10 Biggest and Most Shocking Celebrity Meltdowns
Published on July 23, 2013. Updated November 25, 2016Celebrity meltdowns are nothing new, but some will go down in infamy as the wildest and craziest of their time – the Ghengis Khans of Hollywood instability. Here are ten we consider the very worst:
10. Kanye West
He’d already posed as Jesus on the cover of Rolling Stone, so it should come as no surprise that Kayne West is considered, by many, to be full of himself. Although, no one quite expected the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards when he rushed the stage while country crooner Taylor Swift was accepting her award for Best Female Video. He grabbed the mic from her hand, interrupted her speech and declared to everyone that his choice, Beyonce, should have won instead. More recently, he went off on a rant during one of his concerts, and then followed up by canceling the rest of his tour dates. A few days later he was admitted to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.
9. Russell Crowe
It’s tough when you can’t make an international call, but Russell Crowe took things a step too far in 2005 when he decided to blame a hotel clerk for the nuisance. According to police reports, he hit the man in the face with the telephone before the cops were called and Crowe was led away in handcuffs.
8. Mariah Carey
Total Request Live was MTV’s flagship show in 2001, not only for the music videos but also for the crazy celebrity moments they sometimes caught on camera. Mariah Carey, for example, once appeared on set in little more than a t-shirt to hand out popsicles while acting completely and utterly bizarre. She wound up entering a psychiatric hospital several months later.
7. Reese Witherspoon
She’s not a lawyer, she just played one in Legally Blonde. Too bad that didn’t actually stop Reese Witherspoon from embarrassing herself during a traffic stop in 2013, where the clearly intoxicated star argued with the officer, faked a pregnancy, and at one time demanded, “Do you know who I am?”
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6. Charlie Sheen
“I’m tired of pretending I’m not a total bitchin’ rock star from Mars,” said Charlie Sheen during his slow descent into insanity in 2011, which included drugs, porn stars, broken multi-million dollar contracts and crazy interviews about Vatican assassin warlocks.
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5. Alec Baldwin
Sure, no one’s a perfect father all the time, but when you’re leaving voicemails for your 11-year-old daughter that call her a “thoughtless little pig” and threaten to “straight her out,” that’s when family courts start barring you from visitation. And that’s exactly what happened to Alec Baldwin in 2007, thank God.
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4. David Hasselhoff
Another father of the year, David Hasselhoff, made headlines in 2007 when his teenage daughter caught him on camera trying to drunkenly eat a cheeseburger while lying on the floor and wearing only blue jeans. When asked why he “kept doing this to himself,” Hasselhoff admitted he was lonely and had “trouble in his life.” Another gold star for Hollywood parenting!
3. Christian Bale
In 2008, when the director of photography walked on the set of Terminator Salvation and accidentally ruined the shot, Christian Bale had serious concerns about his professionalism. That’s why he went on a four-minute, profanity-laden rant, threatening to “kick his f***ing a**” and “f**ing trash his lights” and demanding that he be fired or Bale would walk off set. Bale apologized later and claimed he was having a bad day, but that didn’t stop the Internet from spreading the audio tape far and wide, even turning his meltdown into a techno remix.
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2. Amanda Bynes
With multiple arrests, hit-and-runs and wild public appearances, the craziest thing about Amanda Bynes shouldn’t be her Twitter account, and yet it is. The former Nickelodeon star has captured almost 3 million followers with her bizarre updates, including “I want Drake to murder my vagina,” “I need to get another nose job after seeing my mugshot!” and, perhaps most famously, tweeting to Rihanna, “Chris Brown beat you because you’re not pretty enough.”
1. Britney Spears
What happens to former tween celebs that makes them so unstable? Britney Spears kept the trend alive and well in 2007, when she topped off an increasingly strange year by shaving her head and attacking a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. Hit ’em, baby, one more time.