[4] His parents divorced in 1966;[5] Patricia Lawford moved from California to New York City with her son and daughters.

[6] Before his parents' divorce, Lawford attended St. Martin of Tours Elementary School in Los Angeles, where at the age of 8, he was informed about his uncle John F. Kennedy's assassination.

[10] In 1969, the year after his uncle Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, when Lawford was 14, he was introduced to LSD by his peers at school.[2]: p.

[12][7] Lawford briefly attended Fordham Law School, but dropped out after a few months due to his dependency on heroin.

In April 1984, the same year his father Peter Lawford died at the age of 61, after years of alcohol and drug abuse, Lawford's cousin and best friend David Kennedy, and third oldest son of Robert Kennedy, who also battled substance abuse issues, died of a drug overdose at the age of 28.

He performed in commercials in Boston for two years, and then he and his wife moved to Southern California in 1988 so that he could pursue an acting career.

Lawford played a Navy officer in the 2000 film Thirteen Days, a drama about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

[8][10] In 1997, Lawford had a role in the independent comedy Kiss Me Guido as the gay lover of the main character.

[6] In 2005, Lawford appeared in the motorcycle racing film The World's Fastest Indian, co-starring Anthony Hopkins.

[17] In 2009, he wrote Moments of Clarity, a compilation of first-person recollections by famous addicts, including Ed Begley, Jr., Alec Baldwin, Buzz Aldrin, Richard Dreyfuss, Martin Sheen, Judy Collins, and musician and federal prisoner Dejuan Verrett.

[18][19] Lawford told interviewer Connie Martinson that although writing Moments of Clarity was "difficult" and he did not want to do it, the book was "meant to happen".

He was a public health campaigner, and worked with the World Health Organization (WHO), the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, and was a public advocacy consultant to Caron Treatment Centers, an organization that ran treatment programs.

[6][25] On September 4, 2018, after experiencing a medical emergency while at a yoga studio, Lawford died of a heart attack in Vancouver, British Columbia.