DENZEL'S DECADE OF SOBRIETY

Expensive wine was his weakness but these days the legendary Hollywood actor is all about clean living

- MELON RADEBE

FOR THE longest time he’s been one of the genuinely good guys in Tinseltown.

He’s been married for more than 40 years, his kids are successfully paving their own way in showbiz, he hasn’t been involved in scandals and he’s the consummate professional at work.

Which is why it came as a shock to fans when Denzel Washington recently revealed he battled booze for decades and is now marking 10 years of sobriety.

“I’ve done a lot of damage to the body,” he wrote in an essay for Esquire magazine.

His tipple of choice was wine, not hard tack such as vodka or whisky – and that, he says, was part of the problem.

His issue with alcohol started in an almost deceptive fashion.

“Wine is very tricky. It’s very slow. It ain’t like, boom, all of a sudden,” he says.

He began indulging in the drink as a luxury treat. “I had this ideal idea of wine tastings and all that, which is what it was at first. And that’s a very subtle thing.”

Denzel has a wine cellar in his mega-mansion in Beverly Park in Los Angeles, which he bought in 1996, and it increased his appreciation of high-end bottles.

“I learned to drink the best. I was popping $4 000 [now R72 000] bottles – not because I needed them but because that’s what was left after finishing the cheaper wine.”

He would ask his staff to fetch “two of the best of this or that” from his cellar every day and his wife, Pauletta, once asked him why he ordered “just two”.

“I said, ‘Because if I order more, I’ll drink more’,” he recalls. “So I kept it to two bottles and I would drink them both over the course of the day.”

But his drinking was confined to his home life, he says, and he never drank while he was preparing for movies or plays. He didn’t even drink while filming the 2012 movie Flight, in which he played an alcoholic pilot.