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Requiem for Brad Renfro
By John H. Leeper
The death of 25-year-old actor Brad Renfro on Tuesday in Los Angeles grieves me deeply. I had known the lad for several years. Once, he came to visit my family's farm in Lake County.
Brad was an incredibly talented young man, snatched from obscurity at age 12 when he landed a starring role in the film The Client, alongside Hollywood heavyweights Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones. A natural in the field of acting, he went on to star in such films as Tom and Huck, Apt Pupil, The Bully, and Deuces Wild. But like so many other talented young men in the U.S. today, his career was derailed by addictions to drugs and alcohol.
Several years ago, Brad befriended my oldest daughter, Rachele, and during a visit they made to the farm, I wrote a feature article on his life in Hollywood that appeared in the Dyersburg State Gazette.
While a cause of death has yet to be determined at the time of this writing, I am reasonably confident drugs and alcohol were, at the very least, contributing factors.
The last time I saw Brad face-to-face was on Christmas Eve of 2006. He had come to Knoxville to visit his family and wanted to spend a few hours with my daughter. He had recently come out of a drug rehab program, one more link in a chain of unsuccessful interventions. I felt then that the cards were stacked against him. While I know that he wanted to clean his life up, Brad had been involved with hard drugs, which have a terrible impact on the human brain and the body's chemistry. To complicate matters, there was the hedonistic youth culture surrounding the entertainment industry, and the odd nature of acting as a profession. Brad received periodic royalties for his films, so, there were long periods of idleness as he waited for the next film role. There is something to be said for young men having to get up every morning and go to work.
Brad wasn't a bad human being. On the contrary, he was a decent one who made some bad decisions at an age when he was too young to comprehend the ultimate consequences.
I am glad Brad achieved what he did in the film industry at such a young age. He was a good craftsman when he was on the set. I hope he will be remembered for that.
Young people can carry away two lessons from his untimely death. The first, of course, is to stay away from drugs. They will destroy the great promise that life holds. The second is that no matter how glamorous a profession may appear, such as acting in the Hollywood movie industry, it provides no insulation from the travails of life.
--John Leeper
Additional information can be found at here and here.
Update: latest articles in local paper available at "Brad Renfro: The End" and "Renfro's death pains director...."
PDF versions of the these articles are available at "Renfro: The End" and "Renfro's death."