Mariel Hemingway - granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway

Mariel Hemingway.

Actress Mariel Hemingway hopes going public in a documentary about the curse that has plagued her family will finally dispel any mystery around their battles with addiction and raise awareness about mental illness.

For years, Hemingway ignored the drinking, addiction and mental illness that coursed through her family, leading several relatives to take their own lives.

Her grandfather Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, killed himself in 1961 just months before she born.

Mirroring his own father's suicide, he shot himself.

One of her sisters, Margaux, died of an overdose in 1996 at the age of 42, and her youngest sister, Joan, has been in and out of institutions for a decade.

Mariel Hemingway, 51, who soared to fame in her Oscar-nominated role in the Woody Allen film "Manhattan", has faced her own demons, battling depression.

But she hopes that talking opening about the so-called Hemingway curse in a new documentary, "Running from Crazy", will help others confront mental illness in their own families.

EB