Barry Livingston is a survivor.
He didn’t have cancer, wasn’t in an accident and didn’t get hurt. But he survived something much more unlikely — being a child star in Hollywood.
And decades later, his career is still alive and still going strong.
From 1961 to 1972, he came into our living rooms every week as Ernie Thompson in the beloved family show “My Three Sons.” These days, he’s appeared in “Mad Men,” “Two and a Half Men,” and in the Academy Award nominated film “The Social Network.”
He’s writing about his unlikely Hollywood career in his new book, “The Importance of Being Ernie: From My Three Sons to Mad Men, a Hollywood Survivor Tells All.”
For a long time, Barry says his famous childhood role was a monkey on his back. But now he’s says he’s learned to use that monkey and put him to work.
He explains why he think he survived relatively unscathed when so many other child stars spiraled out of control. He admits he went through a dark period of too much alcohol, too many drugs and too little work. But he learned to slog his way back and learned how to start over in Hollywood.
Did you know his real-life brother played his (adopted) TV brother Chip on “My Three Sons.” He explains how that probably helped him avoid the pitfalls of Hollywood and gave him someone to talk to who understood exactly what he was going through.
Plus, he shares stories from working with everyone from Lucille Ball to Brad Pitt.