Inside the Culkin Family's Triumph After Trauma — How Brothers Kieran and Macaulay Are Now 'Living Best Lives' After Tragic Loss and Family Strife

Kieran Culkin's Best Supporting Actor Academy Award win was the crowning moment for a family of actors whose lives could have turned out much differently.

Kieran and brother Macaulay have been able to survive and thrive in their professional and personal lives, RadarOnline.com can reveal, putting their troubling childhoods officially behind them.

Before fame, Kieran, Macaulay, and their five siblings all lived together with parents Kit and Patricia in a tiny apartment in New York City. Kieran has described their childhood home as "barely suitable for a couple," let alone for a family of nine.

He described their place in his 2018 interview with Vanity Fair: "It was just a hallway, and there were no separating doors, except for the bathroom, which didn't have a lock. They raised seven kids in that apartment – for years. They just kept bringing babies home to this little space."

Their parents ended up meeting a stage manager at Ensemble Studio Theater, and they were later introduced to casting director Billy Hopkins, who gave Macaulay his first role at 6 years old in the 1988 drama Rocket Gibraltar.

Fame would soon follow.

However, during his appearance in the WTF With Marc Maron podcast in 2018, Macaulay revealed Kit treated him badly because the patriarch resented his success as an actor.

Macaulay said: "(He said) 'Do good or I'll hit you.' He was a bad man. He was abusive, physically and mentally – I can show you all my scars if I wanted to. Everything he tried to do in life, I excelled at before I was 10 years old."

Sources claimed Kit never allowed his hardworking sons a break – and earned a rep as a Hollywood bully who tried to wrestle creative control of their movies from studio executives.

While Kieran has never shared any stories of abuse, he and Kit have no relationship.

The A Real Pain star previously told The Hollywood Reporter: "He wasn’t a good person and, yeah, probably not a good parent."

Instead, he gives all of the credit for his success to his mother, singling her out at the Golden Globes: "I don’t know how she did it," while calling her an "amazing woman."

After their parents divorce, the Culkin kids did not want to go with their father. Macaulay filed a legal request to erase Kit and Brentrup's names from his trust fund and appointed an executor to manage his finances.

The Home Alone star hasn’t seen or spoken to his elderly father in several years now.

Macaulay previously addressed the estrangement, and once said of his dad: "He was abusive. Physically and mentally. I’m going around the country, locked in a room with a man who didn’t like me."

The fed-up star would quit acting at 14 because of his tense relationship with his dad — and two years later became emancipated from both parents.

But sources spilled the once-impish screen star is now living happily in Los Angeles with former Disney kid star Brenda Strong, mother of Dakota, named after Macaulay’s late sister, who was fatally struck by a car in 2008 at age 29.

“People in Macaulay’s life say to him it would be nice to give Kit one more visit. But Macaulay won’t and says that chapter is closed,” said the source.

They added: “He’s already said what he wanted to about his rotten childhood and how his dad tormented him and made him work nonstop until he cut away from both his parents,” the source said. “He says his dad is not a good person and he doesn’t want him anywhere near his kid!”