Eddie Marsan: Mitch Winehouse actor says Amy’s father ‘told me he’d made mistakes’

Mitch Winehouse has admitted he “made mistakes” when it came to getting Amy the help she needed for her addiction issues.

He made the revelation to Eddie Marsan, who stepped into Mitch’s shoes for the new biopic about the singer’s life and career, Back to Black.

The actor, 55, explained that he sat down with Mitch for a few afternoons to discuss what really happened when the singer died at just 27.

“He’s much more self-aware and candid than he’s perceived,” Marsan, 55, told The Telegraph.

“He talked about the experience of having a daughter who was an addict and one of the most famous women in the world, and with every drug dealer in London wanting to give her drugs. He told me he’d made mistakes – he’d be [like], ‘What could I have done differently?’

“But one thing I did realise is, the family did nine interventions. They tried to get help. My daughter’s 19 – if she was famous with that much money and a habit, I don’t know if I could help her.”

Mitch stressed to Marsen that his daughter’s eventual death at the age of just 27 came at a time when it seemed like she had turned her life around.

Prior to dying as a result of alcohol poisoning, Amy had been sober for a time, but unfortunately, her body could not handle any more abuse.

Marsen said: “Mitch showed me a photograph taken two weeks before she died and she’s so healthy – she’d put on weight.

“And then Mitch went to New York and she had a binge session and her heart gave out.”

Mitch, 73, has been subject to a lot of criticism over the years for how he handled his daughter’s highly publicisied personal struggles.

He, for example, reportedly said that she did not need to go to rehab, and she referenced it in her hit song, stating “my daddy thinks I’m fine”.

But he has stressed repeatedly since then that he did send her to rehab on multiple occasions.

“How many times do I have to say I sent her there?” Mitch told the Jewish Chronicle in 2020. “Not just once, six or seven times. She wouldn’t stay. Amy wasn’t a child and it never occurs to people [that] I’m a grieving father.”

Mitch is also accused of piggybacking on his daughter’s success to launch his own musical career shortly before her death.

“I was here before Amy. But I know that I only got the chance to make the album because I was Amy’s dad,” he admitted to the New York Times in 2011.

The new Back to Black film centres around the award-winning album of the same name and how it came to be following Amy’s relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, who famously introduced her to the substances that would contribute to her eventual death.