Addicted, arrested and dead in a hotel corridor…Victoria Jones is the latest child of a famous parent to tragically spiral. So why ARE so many children of the rich and famous cursed?

Posing beside their parents on the red carpet, clad in couture and with expensively polished smiles, Victoria Jones and Nick Reiner appeared to have the world at their feet.

Victoria’s father, Oscar-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, is widely revered for his brooding charisma, while Nick’s director father Rob Reiner was the beloved creative force behind When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride. Educated at the best schools, and raised in the most lavish of homes, the Jones and Reiner children wanted for nothing.

Yet that could not stop the world from collapsing in on them.

Nick, 32, a long-suffering drug addict recently diagnosed with schizophrenia, now stands charged with murdering his parents Rob and Michele Reiner in their Beverly Hills beds in the early hours of December 14.

Victoria, 34, was found dead on New Year’s Day in a corridor in a San Francisco hotel. Her cause of death is yet to be confirmed but early reports have suggested that Victoria, who had long struggled with substance abuse issues, may have consumed fentanyl-laced drugs.

That the scions of Hollywood royalty could be so afflicted may surprise some, but psychologists stress how challenging it can be growing up as the child of a celebrity. Limitless money can facilitate limitless bad choices and leave a young person without direction or discipline. The spotlight can be extremely unwelcome, fostering paranoia and reclusiveness.

‘Even when you are not in the public eye, parenting it’s hard enough: keeping them alive, making them well rounded individuals,’ said Nicole Ryan, host of the parenting podcast Have Kids They Said, which dissects the daily drama of raising children.

‘Plus, you have them perhaps looking up to you, comparing themselves to you. So when your parent is world famous, that’s all magnified – there’s nothing normal or real about being a celebrity, being fawned over and chased. You become a zoo animal.’

Ryan, who also hosts a SiriusXM morning show, said celebrity parents will ‘do the best you can, to lessen them being in the spotlight.’

She added: ‘They don’t need to go to every red-carpet event, every premiere. Maybe change their last name. Do everything in your power to protect that privacy.

‘Even if you are a brilliant man, like Rob Reiner, you are making a sacrifice in being away from your family for extended periods of time. Some of these celebrities are on tour for months on end: there’s nothing normal about that.

‘If you are going to have kids, you need to raise them. Make sure you have a plan, to make sure their life is as normal as possible: put in your contracts you’re only away for a certain amount of time, or they come with you.

‘But there’s no avoiding that, being famous, on some level is selling your soul to the devil.’

The Reiners had privately confided in friends about their struggles with Nick over the decades, with Michele telling friends she was at her ‘wits’ end’ with their son’s cycle of relapses.

Jones, 79, refrained from commenting publicly on his daughter’s problems, which it now emerges were well documented.

In April 2025 she was arrested for drug possession and obstructing a peace officer; two months later she was arrested and charged with domestic battery and elder abuse.

But they are far from the first Hollywood family to suffer behind closed doors.

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson’s son Chet Hanks

As the son of one of America’s most beloved couples, Chet Hanks is the self-described ‘black sheep of his family,’ according to his talent agency.

Now 35, Chet is three years sober – sobriety that was hard earned. He was sent as a child to a special school for wayward teenagers and remained troubled throughout his 20s.

In August 2024 he told a podcast of his highly publicized struggles, describing falling into a pit of despair in Las Vegas.

‘Here I am, 31 years old, broke, strung out, sucked up, just skinny, just at rock bottom,’ he said, describing his reckoning.

‘I just knew, man, if I don’t change my life in a drastic way, either I’m not even going to be around or something bad, so bad, is going to happen that my life might as well be over.’

In 2015, when Chet was 25, he admitted the extent of his addictions, describing in a series of Instagram posts how he was drowning in cocaine and crack, and was determined to turn his life around.

‘It’s been a long journey discovering who I am,’ he said. ‘Because all the pressures that I’ve dealt with in my life – you know, being the son of my dad and everything. Just trying to find where I fit in.’

Tom Hanks publicly praised his son’s unvarnished honesty.

‘As a parent, you love your kids unconditionally,’ he said at the time. ‘You support them every step of the way. You got to applaud the bravery and honesty when it actually comes out of your own house.’

Chet is now clean, making music with country band Something Out West and starring in Mindy Kaling’s Netflix comedy Running Point.

‘A lot of people struggle with addiction,’ he told Men’s Health in March. ‘They might not want to admit that to themselves. Maybe they’re just kind of stuck. If telling my story can encourage them to get out of their own way, that’s important to me.’

Michael Douglas and Diandra Luker’s son Cameron Douglas 

The only child of Michael Douglas and his first wife Diandra Luker, Cameron had a gilded childhood fitting of Hollywood royalty – capped by starring, aged 24, in the 2003 film It Runs In The Family, alongside his two-time Oscar-winning father and thrice-nominated grandfather, Kirk Douglas.

But by then the wheels were already coming off the track. From the age of 13 he had smoked marijuana and experimented with acid and mushrooms; two years later he graduated to cocaine.

By the time he was filming It Runs In The Family, he was on heroin.

In 2009 he was caught in an undercover sting operation and his father – by then married to Catherine Zeta-Jones – handwrote a five-page letter pleading for leniency from the judge.

The Wall Street star said his oldest son had a privileged but complicated childhood, where Cameron was largely left to his own devices.

‘Cameron found his family in the gang mentality,’ he wrote, adding that his Hollywood lineage only heightened Cameron’s detachment from reality.

‘I have some idea of the pressure of finding your own identity with a famous father,’ he wrote. ‘I’m not sure I can comprehend it with two generations to deal with.’

Cameron was sentenced to five years in prison, but was given additional time after he was caught smuggling drugs into a correctional facility: he was finally released after seven years, and, now aged 47, has been sober ever since.

‘I think when somebody is really struggling, to have love and support is crucial,’ said Cameron in 2023. ‘Because at least for myself, there are some parts of my life that were so dark that I was maybe starting to lose hope for myself. Then having the love and support of people that you also love and respect, it was just critical for me.’

Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s daughter Talullah Willis 

The youngest daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, Talullah, 31, has been open about her past struggles with anorexia and diagnosis with borderline personality disorder. At times, she has said, during her ‘awkward tweenage years,’ she wanted to ‘end it all.’

In 2023 she was diagnosed with autism and spoke about how the developmental disorder manifested in the form of ‘extreme sensitivity’ in all five senses. She told People magazine: ‘I’ve had a heightened sense of taste, smell, touch, sight and hearing since I was a child.’

She has often shared troubling posts on social media including images of herself, her skin covered in red blotches, due to what she refers to as her ‘skin picking disorder.’

And in 2021 she posted on Instagram that she had long ‘punished’ herself for, ‘not looking like my mom,’ after being told that she looked like her father.

She said: ‘I resented the resemblance as I believed wholly my “masculine” face was the sole reason for my unlovability.’

Being the daughter of one of the world’s most beautiful actresses has been a source of mental torment for Talullah who claims to have been relentlessly mocked and cruelly bullied throughout her childhood.

She suffered years of ‘self-hate,’ she said and was so ashamed of her looks that she couldn’t even bring herself to say the word ‘chin’ out loud. Writing in Vogue in 2023 she stated that, for many years, she ‘just lived with the silent certainty’ of her own ‘ugliness.’

Years of therapy have helped her embrace her beauty and the looks that she owes to her famous parents.

Sharing a carousel of throwback pictures of herself with her father on Instagram last year she wrote: ‘My Lordy! If I am NOT this man’s child. Wow this is making me so full and emotional…The face, the smile, dare I say it the chin (hey @perez remember when you bullied a 13-year-old for money?) that made me want to end it all, is now the most precious gift I could be bestowed with.’

Cher and Gregg Allman’s son Elijah Blue

It is just seven months since Elijah Blue Allman was rushed to hospital in Joshua Tree, California, having suffered a near-fatal drug overdose.

San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Deputies responded to a residence at about 1.25pm on Saturday, June 14, where they found the 48-year-old who was, sources said, ‘very lucky to have survived.’

Two months earlier, in April 2025, Elijah was served divorce papers by his estranged wife Marieangela ‘Queenie’ King. The 37-year-old cited ‘irreconcilable differences and gave the date of their separation as March 31, 2025.

Barely four weeks later Elijah was filmed wandering around in a ‘zombie-like’ state outside LA’s Chateau Marmont Hotel – disheveled and incoherent, his legs covered in sores.

In 2014 Elijah revealed that he began using drugs like weed and ecstasy when he was just 11-yearsold. He was, he told ET ‘just looking to escape all the things in my past and, that’s when you turn to those kind of drugs…heroin and opiates.’

Heroin, he stated, ‘kind of saved’ him. Without it, he said, he didn’t know what he would have done: ‘You may jump off a bridge. If you can only just go through that time period and live through it and then get help.’

But getting help, and getting clean, has proved a constant battle for Elijah.

In 2024 his mother petitioned LA Superior Court to appoint her as his temporary conservator, arguing that his drug addiction, plus mental and physical health issues, made him unable to manage the $120,000 he receives from his late father’s trust each year.

According to the singer she feared he would simply use his $10,000 monthly payments to feed his drug habit.

The judge rejected her petition despite her attorney Gabrielle Vidal arguing that, ‘absent a [conservatorship] order today,’ the money from the trust could put Elijah ‘in a life or death position.’

Nicholas Cage and Christina Fulton’s son Weston Cage Coppola 

Metal musician and actor Weston Cage Coppola, whose great uncle is Francis Ford Coppola, has described growing up as part of such a famed clan as ‘ferocious.’

‘There were times I would communicate with people and realize that they had completely made their own definition about me for themselves, without even getting to know me,’ he said in 2019.

Now 35 and married to his fourth wife, Jenifer, Weston spent years in the wilderness.

Arrested for DUI, assault, and a hit and run, Weston said he was out of control.

‘It got to the point where people thought I was digging my grave,’ he told People magazine in 2015.

Weston was sentenced in April 2025 to a two year-mental health program, following a July 2024 attack on his mother.

His famous father has always insisted he loved and prioritized his children.

Cage is also father to Kal-El, born in 2005 to third wife Alice Kim and daughter August, born in 2022 to his fifth wife, Riko Shibata.

‘There’s no version of Nick Cage that didn’t put family first over career,’ the actor said. 

‘I turned down Lord of the Rings and I turned down Matrix because I didn’t want to go to New Zealand for three years or Australia for three years because I needed to be home with my son Weston, that’s a fact.’