Paul Drinkwater/NBC(NEW YORK) — Robert Downey Jr. is mourning the loss of his mother Elsie Ann Downey. The actor took to Facebook on Friday to post a long eulogy celebrating his mom as his “role model as an actor.”
Downey’s mother passed away on September 22, and he writes, “I feel the need to run the risk of over sharing…I wanna say something about her life, and a generic ‘obit’ won’t suffice.”
After giving some background on her early life, the Iron Man star spoke about some of her early work as an actress, but then reveals that by the mid-’70s, she’d became an alcoholic, and got her last paying job — a recurring role on the show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman — in 1976.
She eventually beat her addiction disease, only to be plagued by medical problems. Downey writes, “By 1990, she’d had enough, went to treatment, got sober. Just in time to enjoy several decades of heart disease, bypasses, you name it.”
Downey then mentions his personal struggles with substance abuse, writing, “While I strived to have the kind of success that eluded [my mother], my own addiction repeatedly forbade it. In the summer of 2004, I was in bad shape. She called me out of the blue, and I admitted everything. I don’t remember what she said, but I haven’t drank or used since.”
He then recalls returning from filming Avengers: Age of Ultron in June to visit his ailing mom, who was on life support at the time.
“To my amazement, she was completely lucid, interactive, mugging + pulling faces,” he writes. “We couldn’t speak ’cause she had a tracheal tube. I wondered if she might just beat the odds once more. Another set of seizures answered that, and we brought her home for hospice. She died @ 11 p.m., September 22nd, survived by her extremely loving and tolerant partner of 37 years, Jonas Kerr.”
Downey adds, “She was my role model as an actor, and as a woman who got sober and stayed that way. She was also reclusive, self-deprecating, a stoic Scotch-German rural Pennsylvanian, a ball buster, stubborn, and happy to hold a grudge. My ambition, tenacity, loyalty, ‘moods,’ grandiosity, occasional passive aggression, and my faith….That’s all her…and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
He finishes by writing, “If anyone out there has a mother, and she’s not perfect, please call her and say you love her anyway.”
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