Cannes film festival: Performer is as good as ever but her actor character is thinly conceived in a fundamentally implausible depiction of how to grapple with alcoholism

It’s always a pleasure to see that funny, smart performer Adèle Exarchopoulos in Cannes – after all, she made Cannes history by being jointly awarded the Palme d’Or for the 2013 film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, sharing the big prize itself with the director Abdellatif Kechiche and her co-star Léa Seydoux. Exarchopoulos has her moments in this film from Jeanne Herry, in which she plays an actor struggling with a drinking problem. The scenes in which we see her up on stage, boisterously performing in a touring theatre for schoolkids, are genuinely great. But really this is a very glib and unsatisfying drama, whose essential naivety becomes apparent when the lead character is forced to confront the crisis in her life.

Exarchopoulos plays a young actor called Garance; she adores Arletty’s character of the same name in Marcel Carné’s movie classic Les Enfants du Paradis. At the moment, she has an assistant stage manager position in a prestigious Paris repertory company, believing herself to be on the verge of getting some serious speaking parts when the next season’s casting is announced. But she is instead relegated to the touring schools company, where her undoubted talents are compromised by partying extremely hard every night and waking up with a terrible hangover every morning.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Liverpool-born actor says depression and anxiety followed death of his father when he was 15

The actor David Morrissey has spoken of how “terrible” social anxiety contributed to him becoming an alcoholic.

“I am a recovering alcoholic,” Morrissey, who has been sober for 21 years, told Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “Drinking first was about anxiety. I’ve had this terrible social anxiety and that helped me get through it.”

For most of his life, John Robins assumed he got more out of alcohol than it took from him. Now he knows it was the other way round

• ‘I picked up the bottle of wine and drank straight out of it. I was seven’ Read an exclusive extract from his new memoir

The comedian John Robins has always loved talking about booze. In his standup, he used to portray himself as a bon viveur who knew how to give himself the best of times; a larky drinker out for a laugh; a nerdy tippler who recorded nights out in Sherlock Holmes-themed notepads – arrival time, drinks consumed, percentages of alcohol, pub atmosphere. He also had a routine about contracting gout, even though he never has done in real life.

On the radio, he hosted a show with his friend Elis James in which they meticulously detailed pub crawls and coined the phrase “Keep it session”, encouraging listeners to stick to low-alcohol beer when out for the whole evening. If anybody was in doubt about his love of booze, Robins then devised a podcast series called The Moon Under Water, named after George Orwell’s 1946 essay describing the perfect pub. In it, Robins and his co-host Robin Allender invited guests to design their dream watering hole. Yet, despite dedicating so much time to the discussion of booze, Robins could never find the right word to describe his relationship with it. Then in 2023 he finally discovered it: alcoholic.

An exclusive extract from the comedian’s new memoir

• ‘I wanted alcohol to take me to a place where I was not’ Read an interview with John Robins

The first time I tasted alcohol that wasn’t licked off a cork would have been at about the age of five or six. I’m terrible with years and the memory is incredibly hazy. But I was at the house of my godmother, Heather. For some reason they were drinking champagne. I don’t think I remember my mum drinking any kind of alcohol more than a dozen times in my whole life. She claims, and I believe her, to never have been drunk. Considering her son has been drunk, and I’m working from the back of a fag packet here, 4,000 times, that’s quite a contrast. But champagne?! What could the occasion have been? The opening ceremony of the Seoul Olympics? The formation of the Lib Dems? (Wikipedia page doing a lot of heavy lifting here.) Had my dad just moved out? Had the divorce papers come through? Maybe they just had a silly moment, in that wonderful way normal drinkers do – champagne on a Wednesday afternoon! Aren’t we naughty!

For some reason they let me have a sip. Maybe I nagged them until it became intolerable; maybe I just put on my most irresistible face. Maybe they just let me, because of how normal it is to let a child have a sip, and I mean a sip, of wine or beer. Nothing could be more normal. There wasn’t a lot of alcohol around when I was a kid. If we went to a restaurant, Mum might have a gin and tonic. It’s a cliche, but there may have been a glass of sherry at Christmas. It wasn’t a big part of our lives.

Questionnaire completed by 10,000 people finds sobriety on rise, with women slightly more abstemious than men

One in four adults in England do not drink alcohol, with increasing numbers of men and young people deciding to stay sober, according to a survey.

The figures, which come from a questionnaire of 10,000 people as part of the Health Survey for England, found that almost a quarter (24%) of adults in England had not drunk alcohol in 2024, an increase from just under a fifth (19%) in 2022.

After losing her father to alcohol addiction, author Sophie Calon turned to writing – and found clarity, connection and hope in other stories of relapse and recovery

On the night of Boxing Day 2021, my dad’s body was found near a Cardiff hostel. His death, at 55, was as sudden as it was not. For years, alcoholism had been changing the shape of his heart.

He died less than a mile from his old office; top law firm, equity partner. Four miles from our once tight-knit home in a leafy neighbourhood. He had lost both his family and his job in 2019. Raised in Barry, working class, he had been proud of the beautiful life he had built for us. Others thought he “had it all”. He was widely adored, but drinking made him volatile. He was homeless and often behind bars in his final two years.

Funding to end immediately for up to 2,800 grantees of US agency that serves thousands seeking help and in recovery

The Trump administration on Tuesday evening unexpectedly canceled up to $1.9bn in funding for substance use and mental health care, which providers say will immediately affect thousands of patients.

“It feels like Armageddon for everyone who’s on the frontlines of the addiction and mental health space,” said Ryan Hampton, founder of Mobilize Recovery, a national advocacy organization for people in and seeking recovery.

The actor’s publicist and manager worked with him for more than 30 years, before his death in 2023. They discuss the man behind the headlines – and why they are continuing his mission to help others struggling with addiction

Watch the third season of Friends, writes Matthew Perry in his memoir, and you can see how thin he had become by the end of it. “Opioids fuck with your appetite, plus they make you vomit constantly,” he writes. Look again, and yes – his fragile wrists emerge from a shirt that looks as if he has borrowed it from someone far larger, his trousers hang off him – and it’s unbearably sad now, with the knowledge that addiction would kill Perry nearly 30 years later, at the age of 54. At the time, most people watching probably wouldn’t have noticed, dazzled instead by Perry’s sharpness and immaculate comic timing as Chandler Bing, the show’s dry wit. He was having to take 55 Vicodin pills a day – an opioid - just to function and avoid terrible withdrawal symptoms, but he was never high while he was working, he writes in Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, which came out in 2022. He just had to make it to the end of the season so he could get help. Had the series lasted for more than its 25 episodes, he thought it would have killed him.

That was the first time Perry went into rehab. He was 26, and one of the biggest stars in the world. There would be more than 65 attempts to detox from drug and alcohol addiction over the next decades until his death in 2023. Last week, a doctor was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for supplying ketamine in the lead-up to Perry’s death (though not the ketamine that killed him); three others who have pleaded guilty will be sentenced in the coming months.

Imagine what a relaxing and special celebration it could be if it was tailor-made just for you

• The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work

Now is the time of year when some of my clients want to talk about Christmas.

As a specialist in addiction, many are seeking my help for their drinking.