10 High-Profile Celebrities with Learning Disabilities
School is hard enough: difficult classes, bullies,
bad cafeteria food. It can be even more difficult with a learning
disability – in part because unlike physical disabilities, which have
very obvious symptoms, learning disabilities can be harder to identify,
diagnose and treat. But kids with learning difficulties can go from
being the kids who were laughed at or ignored to the people we admire,
want to be, and want to be with.
Some of the most famous people in the world had a
rocky start due to learning disabilities. Some admit they’re still
dealing with their disabilities. But with time, patience and tenacity,
these 10 high-profile celebrities learned to look beyond their
challenges and discovered their talent to wow the world.
Justin Timberlake
When someone has won six Grammy Awards, two Emmys and
produced a slew of hit singles, it might be hard to believe he has a
hard time finishing important tasks. But that’s exactly what Justin
Timberlake has said he’s dealt with for years. The
singer/actor/businessman says that he suffers from both Attention
Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
The Pirates of the Caribbean actress often plays
well-to-do and upper class roles. This is ironic once you know that at
age six, Knightley could neither read nor write. Long before Knightly
was discovering furtive secrets of the seas with Johnny Depp, pining for
true love in a Jane Austen story or corseting herself into oblivion to
play an 18th century aristocrat, she was getting called “stupid” by kids
at school because of her dyslexia.
It might come as no surprise that the guy who was
made famous for playing wildly zany roles like Ace Ventura and The Cable
Guy has ADD. But it’s not all fun and games for him. Carrey has said
that though his ADD fuels his comedy, it also has its downsides. “I’m up
all night walking around the living room,” Carrey has been quoted as
saying. “It’s hard for me to come down from what I do.”
The couch-jumping Mr. Katie Holmes has said that
through school and the production of his first few films, he was
essentially a “functional illiterate” because of his dyslexia. Because
he could not learn his lines by reading them, he would piece together
what he could and chat up the director and producer to fill in the
blanks. One of the reasons Cruise came to appreciate Scientology, in
fact, was that it provided a way for him to complete his education and
relearn the skills he had missed because of his disability.
Some people might think you’d have to be crazy to
want to fly to space on your own private plane. But it’s not craziness
that made Richard Branson, billionaire founder of Virgin Group, what he
is today. It was dyslexia. What he lacked in the ability to take tests
and make decent grades, he more than made up for in social skills and
the ability to connect with people.
“Perhaps my early problems with dyslexia made me more
intuitive: when someone sends me a written proposal, rather than
dwelling on detailed facts and figures, I find that my imagination
grasps and expands on what I read.” – Richard Branson, from Losing My
Virginity: How I’ve Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business
My Way, Times Business, 1998
Read: The World’s 10 Most Successful Men That Didn’t Grow Up – #3 Richard Branson
Take a Grammy Award, add an Oscar, an Emmy, three
Golden Globes, a Cannes Film Festival Award, a People’s Choice Award, a
50-year career and 100 million records sold worldwide and anyone would
have trouble keeping up with those numbers. And it was numbers that gave
Cher trouble in school. She suffered from a condition called
dyscalculia, a learning disorder that makes it difficult for people to
recognize, understand and organize mathematical information or
mathematical symbols. Considering music is based in math… wow.
Environmental activist, legalized-marijuana-supporter
and member of a self-sustaining community in Hawaii, Harrelson gives
off a laid-back hippie vibe. But that relaxed attitude did not come
naturally as Harrelson was diagnosed with Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as a child. With a historic television
career followed by an award-winning film career, you’d never guess.
Like others on this list, the late night host and
comedian says that having a learning disability inspired him to work
extremely hard to prove himself. A dyslexic, Leno had a hard time making
good grades in high school. Still, he found a way to get accepted into
the highly-ranked Emerson College in Boston before moving on to become
one of the most successful comics of all time and hold a coveted spot on
a short list of legendary television talk show hosts.
The fast-talking, charming rogue who gave us great
lines like, “You’re so money,” was once the one being laughed at, not
with. In school, he was put in special education classes because of his
dyslexia. It was there that he learned to make himself feel better by
making others laugh at his jokes, not at him.
Even The Fonz’s parents made fun of him when he was a
kid. Because of his dyslexia and dysgraphia (a learning disability that
affects a person’s ability to write), his German parents gave him a
nickname that translated into “dumb dog” in English. Winkler didn’t find
out what was ‘wrong’ with him until he was in his 30s. Winkler once
told a group of students in 2009: “How you learn has nothing to do with
how great you are. Your job is to find out what your gift is, what your
contribution will be.”
No comments:
Post a Comment