Jane Lynch is pretty damn good at playing at playing tough-as-nails, no-nonsense characters. And it’s no wonder, because she’s fought some pretty hard battles in her life. In addition to alcoholism, the 51-year old actress has recently opened up about an addiction to NyQuil cough syrup. She turned to the medicine, which has similar properties to alcohol, after giving up drinking over twenty years ago. “Though no longer drinking Miller Lite I was in need of something to soothe me,” she writes in her upcoming memoir, Happy Accidents. “The fact that NyQuil had alcohol in it was not something I acknowledged at all. I still considered myself on the wagon.”
She says that her problems escalated during a ten month stint acting in a Broadway play. “I was miserable the whole time,” she continued. “I’d close the drapes, take a swig of NyQuil, toast with a simple ‘bye bye’ and go into a deep sleep.” But the real breaking point came after a night of partying with the cast. “I smoked myself into oblivion that night. I still felt like crap and even lonelier that I had felt before.” She credits the incident with making her go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and she’s been sober ever since. And now that she’s wed her longtime partner Lara Embry, it’s safe to say that she’s indeed gleeful.
