I’m always shocked when people that are rich and famous enough to rise above health issues instead find themselves mired in them. Who do you think is “Too rich to be that unhealthy?”
My #1 is Jorge Garcia, or “Hurley” from the Lost. The guy’s morbidly obese, and is incapable of doing anything about it to the point where the show’s writers had to insert a weird deus ex machina plot device to explain why his character wasn’t losing weight on the island. This dude is rich and famous enough to hire an army of personal trainers, personal chefs, and so on to get him at least down to obese or overweight, but he looks like walking death in the meantime. See: John Goodman, who should be in everyone’s celebrity death pool at all times, and who looked gray in Death Sentence.
An obvious #2 is a seventeen-way tie among the Lindsay Lohan/Pete Doherty/Amy Winehouses of the world - these people are walking corporations, so there’s no excuse for the repeated drug stuff. There’s too much money involved to not have that under control!
Actually, I think he’s made a voluntary decision not to lose weight, or at least not get in any sort of serious exercise regimen. He is dangerously large, but if he’s comfortable with himself, who am I to criticize?
You can’t throw money at addiction issues (obesity related, drug related, alcohol related) and make them go away. My own belief - watching an alcoholic sister go through rehab at a celebrity rehab center - is the money makes it easier to be dysfunctional in the way addicts are. Poor people have to buck up or be miserable - and even then MANY MANY of them prefer to be homeless rather than change. For these guys, they go back to comfortable homes, surround themselves with people who tell them they are wonderful, that their lives are very stressful - and someone else will make sure there is food in the house so they don’t starve. Money is the great enabler for addiction.
I once mentioned that to my brother & he pointed out the time & energy it would take to configure the teeth around fixing that one funky tooth. Plus, I wonder if it would change her vocalizations.
Plus, I think it’s kinda cute.
What gets me are perfectly attractive, tho quirkily so, celebrities who DO have work done- the nose jobs of Ashley Simpson and Ashleigh Tildale are cases in point.
To the OP, the Olsen twins, and hearkening back to older days, Orson Welles and Victor Buono. And of course, Jim Belushi, Sam Kinison, Chris Farley, John Candy…
Belushi and Farley were drug addicts, and rich and famous doesn’t exactly cure that. I don’t know how much money Sam Kinison had when he died - I doubt he was really rich, and he probably blew a lot of it on drugs as well - but he was a touring comedian, and life on the road doesn’t promote good eating habits.
Also, with most of them (and maybe John Goodman as well), being overweight could be considered part of their character. Actors or comedians in that situation do have a sort of disincentive to lose weight. I never liked Chris Farley, but if he wasn’t overweight, there’s no Christian Slater Chippendales sketch, no Matt Foley, and no ‘fat guy in a little coat,’ for starters…
I once heard (no cite) that John Goodman was once thin and very handsome, but he made a conscious decision that he was going to eat whatever he wanted and his weight be damned.
I saw John Candy on a Canadian talk show in the mid-eighties. He’d lost a lot of weight, looked great, said he was going to keep it off even if it lost him roles.
By the time he died, he looked like he’d gained back every pound, and then some. I don’t think wealth and fame give you much more ability to buck the habits and attitudes of a life-time than anybody else has.
Quite right. Fat comedians and comic actors, particularly, often build their personae around the fact that they’re, you know, fat. Even non-comedic types, an actor’s look is often an important part of the casting, and they’re cast as The Fat Character. Non-comedians are likely to be able to adapt better than comedians, but their work will likely dry up badly enough to make life uncomfortable for them.
Not really a good comparison, because anorexia was so little known at the time Karen Carpenter died. Listening to her brother interviewed about it, they were just bewildered at the time about what was going on with her, and never thought it might be life-threatening.
Much later, when I was a kid, one of my swim-teammates whom I carpooled with developed anorexia – and even then (the 80s) anorexia and eating disorders were still a bit of a mystery. Even being a wealthy celebrity wouldn’t have helped if no one thought that anything was wrong.
Roger C. Carmel vacillated between very thin and extremely fat over the years. He was thin when he guested on the ick Van Dyke Show, fat at Harcourt Fenton Mudd on Star Trek (twice) and as a regular on The Mothers in Law. Then he lost weight when he was on All in the Family. At the end of his life, playing Senor Naugles in TV commercials he was fat again.
Oprah Winfrey was famous for her ups and downs.
James Cameron lost a LOT of weight between the time he did Terminator and Aliens and the time he did Terminator 2 and Titanic.