Wild life led Reese Witherspoon and Cheryl Strayed to Golden Globes red carpet

When Reese Witherspoon walks on the red carpet at the Golden Globes ceremony in Beverly Hills it will be a few short steps that conclude a much longer journey.

Reese has been nominated in the Best Actress category for her performance in Wild, the remarkable true story of Cheryl Strayed who found redemption and a path to success by walking 1,100 miles on a solo trek along America’s Pacific Crest.

Abused as a child by her grandfather, and the victim of her father’s violent rages on more occasions than she’d like to recall, Cheryl still managed to graduate a Bachelor of Arts from Minnesota University thanks to the constant support of her mother, Bobbi.

But she descended into a numbing grief when, aged 22, her mother died of lung cancer just seven weeks after diagnosis.

“She was an incredibly glorious good mother,” Cheryl, now 46 and a mum of two herself, tells me.

“She was sunshine in human form and when I was a teenager that annoyed the hell out of me but now I think it’s one of the greatest gifts of my life that my mum was who she was.”

Married at the time of her mum’s death, Cheryl no longer felt intimate towards her husband, Mark.

Instead she started to sleep with any man who took her fancy, and a fair few who didn’t. And if she wasn’t sharing a bed with them she was sharing a needle, getting hooked on heroin. Until one day she decided to go for a walk.

She divorced Mark and took the new surname of “Strayed” to punish herself for her sins, then filled up a backpack (mostly with things she didn’t need) and, with no previous hiking experience, became one of the few people who complete the entire length of the Pacific Crest Trail each year.

“I was never afraid,” she says. “It is not a surprise to women that we are strong or that we are able to do things people tell us we can’t do.”

But Cheryl didn’t stop there. She turned her travels into an international bestseller, Wild, which has now been adapted into a movie.

Inevitably this meant revisiting painful memories for Cheryl, who was a constant presence on set to offer advice to Witherspoon.

“It was a very different kind of scary. Writing is about opening up and telling the truth and for years I’ve been working that muscle.

And I’ve taken a lot of risks in my writing, but I’m in control those are my words, I control what goes in and what stays out.

“But when I said yes to the film I had to trust other people, the writers, producers and actors, to tell my story.

“It didn’t really hit me until I sat down to watch it for the first time with my husband (filmmaker Brian Lindstrom), Reese, and [director] Jean-Marc Valle.

“It was very painful to see my mother’s death being re-enacted. The details of how my mother died, how I found out she was dead, are seared into my mind, and then to see Reese and Laura (Dern), who plays my mum, recreate that; I always cry at that scene.”

Another difficult watch are the flashbacks scenes to her childhood but they have been given a maternal slant as Cheryl’s role as a child is performed by her own nine-year-old daughter, Bobbi.

“The film had started production and producer Bruna Papandrea had met Bobbi and commented that she looked like a young Reese and would she like to come to audition.

“We asked her and she said a flat ‘no’ but some time went by and they couldn’t find a young Cheryl, and she heard me telling this to my husband and she just said from the back of the car ‘I want to audition’.

“So then we tried to talk her out of it! But we went to the audition, she sent me and my husband out of the room, and she did it alone with Jean-Marc and the casting director, and she got the role.

“Of course it was really emotional for me to watch my daughter being present with this man playing my terrible father and then, on the contrary, to have her dancing and playing with Laura and remembering myself doing the same thing with my mother.

“It really was like watching my life flash before me. If writing heals wounds, then witnessing the making of this film healed too. And never so powerfully than when I was watching my daughter live my childhood.

“She wants to be an actress now. I ask her why and she says ‘the donuts’. She loved the on-set catering. I keep telling her there has to be a better reason than that!”