Wonderful news!
Josh Sundquist is a former Paralympian, now a motivational speaker and hilarious comedian who lost a leg to cancer when he was young. He’s very athletic still, and has tremendous dexterity, which he puts to good use in his stand-up routines.
As does Molly Shapiro, who played the daughter in Hereditary.
For the 1972 movie Silent Running, Douglas Trumbull needed bilateral amputees to inhabit the costumes of high-tech drones serving on a space ship. They were played by Mark Persons, Cheryl Sparks, Steven Brown, and Larry Whisenhunt. IMDb lists no other credits for them.
I was chatting with a friend a while ago about non-professional actors who won Academy Awards, and discovered that Russell is buried in a town I travel through reasonably often. I had some free time there a while ago and searched the town cemetery for his grave. Took a while, but I found it. Read up on him a little bit; sounds like an interesting guy.
Cary Grant lost a front tooth as a child, and his remaining teeth migrated to fill the gap as he grew up. Like Sinatra’s earlobe, once you see this in still photos, you can never forget it.
I’ve read that Tom Cruise is somewhat similar.
Another actress with osteogenesis imperfecta: Julie Fernandez, who I know as Brenda, the woman from the Swindon branch who used a wheelchair, from the original The Office. As a teenager, she was also in a really, really, really bad BBC1 soap opera called Eldorado.
HBO was advertising a new season of it around Christmas time, but no date has been set yet. I think a fourth season has also been written too already.
Apparently it last broadcast around the same time as the end of Game of Thrones.
Another rock star example: Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath sliced the tips of his right middle and ring fingers off at the first knuckle when he was working in a sheet metal factory at age 17. He wears prosthetic fingertips (which he originally made himself with a soap bottle and a soldering iron) and strung his guitar with banjo strings so it’d be easier to play, which largely contributed to his signature low-tuned sound.
But pregnancy is a temporary condition, so it’s easy to write it in or work around it (Kerry Washington and Shelly Long, for example).
I agree - and there’s a lot of stuff mentioned here that I don’t think really makes sense. Pregnancy can be disabling but isn’t always* and at some point, commonness negates “disabled” or “differently abled” . I have never seen any circumstances where it was claimed that every person wearing corrective lenses is “disabled” and I am certain it is because well over 50% of adults wear corrective lenses at least part of the time.
I don’t understand how a missing fingertip ( actual tip, not the first knuckle) or tinnitus or teeth moving to fill in a gap constitutes being “differently abled”.
* and actually the PDA amends Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit sex discrimination on the basis of pregnancy and does not define pregnancy as a disability. It does require that people unable to work due to pregnancy or birth must be treated the same as people who are similarly unable to work due for other reasons.
So what. Disabilities may be permanent, temporary or situational. Working pregnant actors is relatively new. There is no difference denying an actor a job because they are missing a limb or being pregnant. My job covers managing ADA and Rehabilitation Act issues and the “Oh, she’s pregnant” attitude still get employers in heaps of trouble.
The Internet rumor/conspiracy is that Tom Cruise is a cyclops.
Agreed. It’s like diabetes - in the UK, at least, that covered under the DDA in respect of you being allowed accommodations like being allowed to keep a drink with you even if you work behind a bar where that’s not generally allowed (like was the case with a colleague when I worked in a pub where that generally wasn’t allowed. It’s not actually a “disability” in general terms unless we’re really expanding the definitions though.
Can you come up with an example where an actor was denied a job because they were pregnant?
Did you read the Pregnancy Discrimination Act you linked to above? It does not say that pregnancy in and of itself is a disability. It says that the act is " To amend Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit sex discrimination on the basis of pregnancy. and " women affected by pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions shall be treated the same for all employment-related purposes, including receipt of benefits under fringe benefit programs, as other persons not so affected but similar in their ability or inability to work". You can’t refuse to hire a pregnant woman who can do the job, but not because pregnancy is a disability - it’s because pregnancy discrimination is defined as a form of sex discrimination. The ADA didn’t become law until 1990, years after the PDA became law in 1978.
And working pregnant actors is not new at all - when Lucille Ball did it in 1952, she wasn’t even the first. And there have been plenty since then.
I’m not him, but I can. Charisma Carpenter comes to mind. That’s more gender discrimination than anything else, because her pregnancy could have been handled easily like some other TV shows do.
Lucy Lawless had to quit the X-Files because she was pregnant, but that was because her role really could not be re-written - just too physical to be safe while pregnant.
But that doesn’t make it a disability. I mean, seriously - it’d mean we could count most actresses as having had a disability. Plus everyone who’s ever been let go from a role because they broke a bone and the role couldn’t be re-written. Temporary disabilities surely don’t count.
Yeah, I was going to say, if pregnancy counts, it seems like we’d also have to count every actor who was ever injured doing a stunt but kept working on the film, which would (imho) make the thread unwieldy and largely pointless.
Maybe not for the sake of this thread, but in real life, yes they do count.