13 Celebrities Who Have Multiple Sclerosis

Best known for her role as Anya on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, more recently, Dotti on WandaVision, Emma Caulfield Ford, 49, announced in October 2022 that she’s been living with MS for more than a decade but had kept her diagnosis secret from all but a few close family and friends.

She decided to go public at last because, as Caulfield Ford told Vanity Fair, “I’m so tired of not being honest.” Having a 6-year-old daughter from whom she didn’t want to hide the disease also influenced her decision, as did her concern that trying to hide it from her colleagues while working in the heat of a Los Angeles summer could potentially worsen her condition.

Describing her first symptoms of MS, which occurred in 2010, Caulfield Ford said, “I woke up one morning, and the left side of my face felt like there were a million ants crawling on it.” On the advice of her acupuncturist, she had an MRI and was quickly diagnosed with MS.

Caulfield Ford’s father, Rodney Chukker, also had MS.

Christina Applegate rose to fame as a teenager when she played the role of Kelly Bundy in the 1987–1997 sitcom Married… With Children. Also known for her roles in the TV series Samantha Who? and Up All Night, the beloved actor has won or been nominated for multiple awards throughout her career, including Primetime Emmy, Golden Globe, and Tony Awards.

In August 2021, when she was 49, the star and executive producer of Netflix’s Dead to Me announced on Twitter that she’d been diagnosed with MS a few months prior. She said living with the disease has been a “strange journey” and a “tough road,” but that she feels supported by other members of the MS community. In a second tweet, she asked for privacy as she navigates her new diagnosis.

This isn’t the first time Applegate has gone public about a health issue she’s faced. In 2008, when Applegate was 36, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and also tested positive for the BRCA gene — commonly known as the “breast cancer gene.”

The news led Applegate to undergo cancer treatment — as well as a double mastectomy (surgery to remove both breasts), as a preventive measure against the cancer's return. In a September 2008 interview with the talk show host Oprah Winfrey, Applegate said of her surgery, “It can be very painful. It's also a part of you that's gone, so you go through a grieving process and a mourning process."

RELATED: 20 Celebrities With Breast Cancer

The actor Selma Blair announced in October 2018, at age 46, that she’d been diagnosed with MS the previous August.

Blair, who starred as Harper Glass in 2019 in the sci-fi TV series Another Life, made her announcement on Instagram, stating, “Biggest thanks to @elizberkley who forced me to see her brother #drjasonberkley who gave me this diagnosis after finding lesions on that MRI. I have had symptoms for years but was never taken seriously until I fell down in front of him trying to sort out what I thought was a pinched nerve. I have probably had this incurable disease for 15 years at least. And I am relieved to at least know. And share.”

Blair described some of the symptoms she’s been experiencing — and the help she’s received on set — as follows: “The brilliant costumer #Allisaswanson not only designs the pieces #harperglass will wear on this new #Netflix show, but she carefully gets my legs in my pants, pulls my tops over my head, buttons my coats, and offers her shoulder to steady myself. I have #multiplesclerosis. I am in an exacerbation. By the grace of the lord, and willpower, and the understanding producers at Netflix, I have a job. A wonderful job. I am disabled. I fall sometimes. I drop things. My memory is foggy. And my left side is asking for directions from a broken GPS. But we are doing it.”

The actress had spoken out in June 2018 about achieving two years of sobriety following an incident in which she was removed from an international flight on a stretcher after mixing alcohol with prescription medication. She also revealed she had suffered from postpartum depression for four years after giving birth to her son, Arthur, in 2011.

In August 2021, Blair tweeted her support to fellow actress Christina Applegate after Applegate announced her MS diagnosis on Twitter.

Jack Osbourne gained notoriety on his family's hit MTV reality show, The Osbournes. A stint in rehab for drug addiction and a dramatic weight loss also put him in the spotlight over the past decade. And just when it seemed that Osbourne, who had recently become a father at 27, was on his way to a healthier life, he announced in June 2012 that he had been diagnosed with MS.

"The timing was so bad," Osbourne told the British magazine Hello. "I'd just had a baby, work was going great ... I kept thinking, 'Why now?'"

Osbourne was diagnosed with MS when a loss of sight in his right eye alerted him to a problem. Timothy Coetzee, MD, the chief advocacy, services, and research officer for the National MS Society, says signs of MS vary from person to person. "It can be the eye, as in Jack's case, or they can't get out of bed, or they have tingling in the right arm but not the left. There is no one consistent set of symptoms."

Osbourne has become an outspoken advocate for MS awareness and often shares his personal experiences with others living with MS.

He returned to reality TV in 2016, costarring with his father in Ozzy and Jack’s World Detour. In the show, the two men travel around the United States visiting various historical sites. In 2021, Jack starred with his father and his mother, Sharon, in The Osbournes Want to Believe, an eight-part series in which Jack tries to convince his parents to believe in the paranormal.

RELATED: Jack Osbourne: ‘MS Is Different for Everyone'

Known to some as “Janice Dean the Weather Machine,” Dean is a senior meteorologist at Fox News Network and a cohost of Fox and Friends. She was diagnosed with MS in 2005 and went public with her diagnosis in 2008.

She described her first symptoms as exhaustion and numbness on the bottoms of her feet and on her thighs. MRI scans showed lesions in her brain and spine, confirming she likely had MS.

Dean sought the advice of Fox News colleague Neil Cavuto, who also has MS and who assured her she’d get through it.

Over the years, Dean has continued to speak publicly about having MS, and in 2018 she made social media headlines when she responded to a viewer who had criticized the appearance of her legs and suggested that she not wear short skirts on air.

In a Facebook post Dean responded, “I'm sorry if you don't like my legs. I'm grateful I have them to walk with.”

She followed up with an opinion piece in which she stated, “My big legs have always been a sore spot for me — but now more than ever I am proud of them. Because with MS, I could lose my ability to walk literally any day. So I’ve learned to be proud of my legs, and am grateful for them every day of my life.”

In addition to her day job, Dean is the author of the Freddy the Frogcaster book series, about an amphibious weather forecaster who faces rainstorms, blizzards, a hurricane, a tornado, and more.

Ann Romney, the wife of former Republican presidential candidate and current senator Mitt Romney, was diagnosed with MS in 1998 at the age of 49. She openly discussed her struggle with the disease on the 2012 campaign trail.

In an interview with ABC's Good Morning America, Romney told the correspondent Robin Roberts that she was diagnosed after experiencing severe numbness and fatigue, and when she got the news it left her "humbled" and "crushed me to dust."

Since then, Romney discovered a passion for horses and believes horseback riding is important therapy for MS. She told Roberts, "I love horses, they have been my companion through my dark hours when I was recovering and gave me strength and joy and hope."

Romney has also described how reflexology, combined with breathing exercises and yoga poses, helped to relieve her fatigue and improve her balance.

In 2014, Romney launched the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases, for which she serves as global ambassador, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The center supports research on a variety of neurological conditions, including MS.

RELATED: Ann Romney’s MS Message Alternately Excites and Angers

Singer Walter Williams, 77, a founding member of the R&B group the O’Jays, first experienced symptoms of MS while on tour with the band in 1983. As he told Cleveland's The Plain Dealer in 2010, he initially attributed the numbness in his toe to new shoes, but then it spread to his foot and leg, and he knew there was a problem.

"I probably stopped in every hospital in every city,” Williams told The Plain Dealer, “trying to find out what was going on."

Within two months, he was diagnosed with MS, but he kept it private for nearly three decades, even as he struggled to perform the spins and turns that characterize the O’Jays’ onstage choreography.

Early on, Williams turned to exercise and eating right to strengthen his body and fight back against MS. In addition, as he told Reuters in 2010, “What aggravated it was heat, so I took cold showers and had a bucket of ice onstage that I could put on my head." Williams credits the drug Avonex (interferon beta-1a), which he started in 1999, with keeping him relapse-free; at one time, he was a paid spokesman for the company that makes it.

The O’Jays recorded such hits as "Back Stabbers" (1972), "Love Train" (1973), and "Use ta Be My Girl" (1978). While the band’s lineup changed over the years, Williams stayed consistent as one of the group’s lead singers, along with Eddie Levert, the childhood friend with whom Williams started the band in 1958. The O’Jays are still touring and performing in 2021.

They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, received BET’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, and entered the R&B Music Hall of Fame in 2013.

Actress Teri Garr was at the height of her career in 1983 when she first noticed symptoms of MS during a jog in New York’s Central Park. Garr inexplicably tripped and felt a stabbing pain in her arm. After years of doctor visits without a diagnosis, Garr finally found out what was ailing her in 1999: She had MS.

Garr started her career in show business as a dancer, appearing in six Elvis Presley movies. She is well remembered for her comedic roles in Young Frankenstein (1974), Tootsie (1982), for which she was nominated for an Oscar, and Mr. Mom (1983), among others.

She was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and Late Night With David Letterman.

Garr went public in 2002 about having MS and became an ambassador for the National MS Society. Garr says that in addition to a healthy diet, exercise, and a good sense of humor, she takes a disease-modifying drug to keep the disease in check.

While Garr retired from acting in movies and TV shows in 2007, she continues to make public appearances and to speak out about what it’s like to live with MS.

In 1997, Fox News Channel anchor Neil Cavuto had already beat Hodgkin lymphoma. So when he began experiencing blindness and tingling, he thought the cancer had returned.

When doctors told him he had MS, the news didn’t give him a sense of relief. “In a way it was worse; with MS there is no cure,” he said in an interview.

Now, more than two decades later, Cavuto, whose raspy voice is a symptom of MS, is still behind the anchor desk. “I just try to take it day by day,” he told Zap2It.com in 2011. “If I can help anyone with MS or a disease and say, 'It's really your attitude,' then I'm doing a service, not by constantly yapping about it, but by doing my job."

In 2016, Cavuto had triple bypass surgery for atherosclerosis in his coronary arteries. But following his recovery, he returned to host the shows Your World With Neil Cavuto and Cavuto Live on Fox News, and Cavuto Coast to Coast on Fox Business network.

When country singer Clay Walker was diagnosed with MS in 1996, his prognosis was bleak. “I was told that I would be in a wheelchair in four years and dead in eight years,” Walker told the Biloxi Sun Herald. But thanks to medication, he went into remission in 1998 and has remained healthy, albeit with some MS symptoms, since then.

To help raise awareness and fund research, Walker founded the nonprofit organization Band Against MS in 2003.

Walker continues to tour and record as a musician. He’s also an enthusiastic golfer who makes exercise an integral part of his MS treatment. In 2018, Band Against MS announced that Walker had won $90,000 for the organization at the annual AT&T Celebrity Pro-Am Golf Tournament in Pebble Beach, California.

When Alan Osmond, one of the members of the Osmonds singing troupe, first began tripping inexplicably onstage in 1987, he was unsure what was happening. He was eventually diagnosed with primary-progressive MS, but he was determined to not be a victim. "I may have MS, but MS does not have me," he often says.

Nearly 20 years later, in 2006, his son David was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting MS. And like his father, David spreads the word about MS as a speaker for the National MS Society. Alan, left, and David, center, are pictured above with brother and uncle Donnie Osmond.

In 2014, David’s song "I Can Do This" was released as part of the Our Voice in Song campaign, which was launched in collaboration with Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation to raise awareness of relapsing forms of MS.

David continues to work as a musician and is the host of Wonderama, a family entertainment TV program with talent shows, segments on science, and games. In a March 2019 interview with Yahoo!Life, David said that although he continues to work, he’s affected significantly by his MS symptoms.

“I’ll be honest, right now I’m in a massive amount of pain. And it’s all over the place, but I don’t dare complain about it,” he told Yahoo!Life.

Actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, best known for playing the daughter of mobster Tony Soprano on the award-winning HBO drama The Sopranos (1999 to 2007), revealed to People magazine in January 2016 that she’d been diagnosed with MS at age 20, some 15 years earlier. She says she revealed her illness to a few trusted colleagues early on, but generally kept it a secret because she was not ready to go public.

Sigler mentioned her two-year-old son with her husband, the baseball player Cutter Dykstra, as one of the reasons she chose to speak out. "I didn't want him to get to an age where he felt like he had to keep this secret for me,” she says. "I wanted to be an example to him of strength and courage."

Of her symptoms, Sigler told People, "I can't walk for a long period of time without resting. I cannot run. No superhero roles for me." She added that while her symptoms have gotten worse over the past decade, she had found, after much experimentation, an MS medication that has stabilized them.

Sigler gave birth to her second child in January 2018.

The former talk show host Montel Williams went public with his MS diagnosis in 1999. "When the neurologist said those words — 'You have MS' — it hit me like a brick," Williams wrote on the now-defunct Montel Williams MS Foundation website. "I thought the diagnosis was a death sentence."

But Williams turned that fear into a foundation, which he started in 2000 to advance MS research. During its years of operation, it distributed more than $1.5 million in grants.

Williams has talked openly about using medical marijuana as an alternative to ease the pain caused by MS, and he advocates for its legalization.

In 2016, Williams started a medical cannabis company called LenitivLabs.

Additional reporting by Ingrid Strauch and Christina Vogt.