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Ethan Hawke had 'black years' after divorce

Feb 9, 2012, 15:32 GMT

Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke describes the period after his divorce from Uma Thurman as the 'black years'.

The 41-year-old actor - who started dating current wife Ryan Shawhughes in 2005 - admits it was 'really difficult' to deal with the time following his split from the Hollywood actress in 2004 which resulted in him living in a hotel in Chelsea, New York, for a few years.

He said: 'I call it the black years. It was really difficult. It was difficult in ways I couldn't even see at the time. There was the obvious way in which it was difficult - the death of a dream, the inability to parent in the way that you want to. But for me it was - what's that Dante quote? 'At the midpoint of my life, I've come to the part of the forest where the straight way is lost.' Nothing teaches you like getting levelled. And I got levelled in my early 30s.

'Nothing went exactly the way I thought it would. Wait a second: love isn't real and, holy s**t, I put all this energy into not making the same mistake my parents did and I just re-enacted them all! I thought I was so much smarter than everybody. And I'm not.'

The 'Dead Poets Society' star - who has two kids, Indiana and Clementine Jane, with Ryan, and two children, Maya and Levon, with Uma - managed to find solace in theatre acting following his split from Uma, and he used his role as a an actor in David Rabe 'Hurlyburly' to take his anger out.

In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Ethan, 41, added: 'I put every ounce of anger that I possibly possessed into that play and I tried to ventilate it. I thought, I can't control what people think about me, but the one thing I can control is whether I'm improving as a performer. And my bet is that if I work on doing that I'll probably also, as a domino effect, improve as a person. That's been the goal of the last five or six years.'