Everyone Loves Her – Can You Guess Who She Is?
She is loved by everyone, and you can’t imagine who she is
Step aside, Aladdin! Barbara Eden at 92: A Classic Icon, a Heartbreaking Death, and a Legacy That Lives On! On August 23, the renowned actress Barbara Eden, who gave the world faith in magic, celebrated her 92nd birthday. She still defies the passing of time.
Eden is still a beloved character in Hollywood, decades after she enchanted audiences as Jeannie in I Dream of Jeannie.
But no amount of TV magic could erase the terrible personal sorrow that lay behind the glitter and gloss of her remarkable career. She suffered the most heartbreaking loss of her life in 2001 when her only son, Matthew Ansara, died from a drug overdose.
From Intimate Origins to Fame
The beginning of Barbara Eden’s Hollywood career occurred amid one of the most trying times in American history. She turned her modest upbringing during the Great Depression into a prosperous and opulent life.
She started her career in television (The Johnny Carson Show, I Love Lucy) and cinema (A Private’s Affair, Twelve Hours to Kill) in 1956, slowly gaining notoriety.
When she costarred with Elvis Presley in the western Flaming Star in 1960, which brought her to a global audience, her career took off.
However, she landed her most famous role in 1965, portraying the lovely but mischievous genie Jeannie in I Dream of Jeannie. Eden, who costarred with Larry Hagman, who portrayed astronaut and U.S.
Air Force Captain Tony Nelson, rose to fame very fast. Her reputation as a television legend was cemented during the five successful seasons of the show.
Eden was managing a major turning point in her own life—motherhood—while she was enthralling audiences as Jeannie.
Raising Matthew Ansara with the Love of a Mother
Eden gave birth to their son, Matthew Ansara, in 1965, the same year she married actor Michael Ansara (Broken Arrow).
After 15 years of marriage, Eden and Ansara finally got divorced when Matthew was nine years old. In retrospect, Eden thinks that their kid was greatly impacted by their separation, which led him down a challenging and tragic path into drug addiction.
She described the initial indications that anything was amiss in an interview.
“When Matthew moved in with his father after I remarried in 1984, I realized he was having problems,” she said. “He was lying about being enrolled in college and sleeping all the time when he returned home following my second divorce.”
For years, Matthew concealed his drug addiction from his parents, having begun using drugs at the age of ten.
She revealed, “Matthew didn’t want to hurt Mike and me, so he never told us he was using heroin.” However, we worked things out. He was losing weight, acting lethargic, and spending the night out. I made him go to a rehab facility, and when he returned home a month later, I allowed him to return home.
Regretfully, his difficulties persisted.
“If your child is using drugs, he has become the drug: He is no longer your child, and he no longer has a home with you,” she disclosed, quoting the experts. “The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was lock him out when he was 20.”
Matthew spent the following twelve years in and out of treatment facilities. His parents tried to support him during his darkest moments and maintained hope despite his difficulties.
“On occasion, when he came to visit us, he would chuckle and say, ‘Here I am, better lock up everything,'” Eden remembered, acknowledging that he frequently stole from them to fund his addiction. However, he would apologize profusely to us when he was sober. There is no one in the world I love more than you.
A Struggle with Addiction
Matthew experienced periods of respite from his addiction. He was married and a UCLA creative writing student at the age of 27. However, as Eden soberingly remembered, “the cycle began again,” and his wife left him.
He became homeless as a result of his hardships.
“Mom, I’m sick,” he called me one day shortly after they split up, sounding half-dead.
After a desperate search, Eden eventually found Matthew in a dilapidated apartment in Venice, California.
She recalled, “I drove to a bad area of Venice with Mike’s wife and another friend, and we found him in his apartment, unconscious from an overdose.”
“He weighed 200 pounds, but we three women got him up and to the car and took him to the hospital, which saved his life,” she added, describing the horrific incident.
Matthew continued to struggle, but at the age of 29, he was given a clinical depression diagnosis and put on medicine, which Eden subsequently disclosed was unsuccessful.
At age 31, he seemed to be recovering once more, embracing sobriety and doing what his parents had done. He had a supporting part in the posthumously released Con Games and a leading role in To Protect and Serve (2001).
In addition, he intended to wed his fiancée, whom Eden called “wonderful.”
“Life is great, Mom,” he said to me one day. She noted, “It’s unbelievable that I was unaware of how green the trees were for so long.”
The Worst Nightmare for a Mother
However, on June 26, 2001, catastrophe struck.
A heartbreaking phone call at three in the morning startled Eden awake: Matthew was gone.
Police had found her 35-year-old son slumped over his truck’s steering wheel six hours prior. Authorities also discovered vials of anabolic drugs in the car, and he was an amateur bodybuilder.
Matthew’s accidental heroin overdose death was later confirmed by the autopsy.
Then he passed away. Eden revealed, “He had taken a dose of exceptionally pure heroin and it was too much for his heart.” Even while he was working out, he did it compulsively, like an addict. He was incapable of exercising restraint.
Sadness and Introspection
Eden, who has been married to Jon Eicholtz since 1991, is still grieving the loss of her only child and keeps thinking back on what went wrong.
Matthew handled it quite badly. She acknowledged that she had questioned if she should have waited until he was older before divorcing Ansara, saying, “He wanted his mommy and daddy to stay together.”
“But I also remind myself that a lot of children from divorced families don’t end up as addicts,” she continued. He prevailed in numerous conflicts. However, he lost his personal conflict.
Matthew was buried next to his father, Michael Ansara, who died of Alzheimer’s-related problems in 2013. Both are interred at Los Angeles’ Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
Today’s Life of Barbara Eden
Although Eden no longer wears Jeannie’s famous pink harem outfit, she is still involved in entertainment. She played Mrs. Claus in the 2019 holiday movie My Adventures with Santa and has made appearances on television programs such as Worst Cooks in America: Celebrity Edition. Love Letters was her final theatrical production in 2019.
Eden is still an inspiration to people worldwide at the age of 92. Despite having experienced unspeakable tragedy, she continues to be a representation of elegance, fortitude, and ageless beauty.
We would like to wish Barbara Eden a very happy birthday on this wonderful day!
Help is also accessible for anyone who is battling addiction or knows someone who is. It could save a life, so please call your local drug abuse hotline.
Let’s tell this tale in order to pay tribute to Barbara Eden and give her the affection and encouragement she so well deserves!
