Author: Jack Ward

For the majority of her adult life, Gina Carano has had her body measured and scrutinized in public. In the late 2000s, she was a prominent figure in women’s mixed martial arts. Later, she became an actress and left the cage to work on movie sets. The fact that her comeback to the spotlight this year was based on a number on a scale seems appropriate, if a little awkward. It weighed 141.4 pounds. On May 15, the day before she returned to competition against Ronda Rousey on Netflix’s first live MMA card, she uploaded it herself. It was her…

The tale of Ryan Gosling, a pile of ice cream cartons, and a film he never starred in is among the most iconic Hollywood tales. It served as a warning about ambition surpassing communication for nearly twenty years. The man who made the call finally chose to add his perspective this year. In 2007, at the age of 26, Gosling was cast as Jack Salmon, the grieving father in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s book. He had carefully read the book. He made the decision that the character, a suburban father gradually disintegrating, should appear heavier, more worn out,…

Some performers disappear from the spotlight before they truly do. Among them was Donald Gibb. He lived quietly in Texas for the majority of the previous 20 years, away from the studios and conventions that once knew his face. When word leaked on May 12 that he had passed away at the age of 71, it came with the peculiar delay that occurs when a well-known character has been absent from the screen for years. TMZ was informed of his son Travis’s passing. He claimed that throat cancer was the cause, although a heart attack had also occurred in the…

When you enter “Chris Ivery’s illness” into a search engine, an odd thing happens. Breathless Instagram videos with all-caps captions, TikTok slideshows set to melancholic piano music, Facebook posts from accounts called “Nurse Chinel,” and nearly nothing from a reliable news source confirming that Chris Ivery, the spouse of Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo, has been diagnosed with any kind of illness at all are all that you get. To put it mildly, there is a striking disparity between the volume of the concern and the substance behind it. Pompeo and Ivery were wed in 2007. After meeting in a…

The timing is almost intolerably cruel. Delta Goodrem’s debut album, Innocent Eyes, was released on March 24, 2003. It broke John Farnham’s records, sold over four million copies worldwide, and spent twenty-nine weeks at the top of the ARIA charts. Her age was eighteen. On July 8, less than four months later, she received a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis. Sitting in a hospital room, the girl who had just emerged as Australia’s biggest young pop star heard the word cancer. The fact that it nearly went unnoticed adds to the story’s strangeness and makes it more difficult to write off as…

Rebecca Front has repeatedly recounted a scene in which she is stranded on a stopped train inside a tunnel, the walls close, the air thickens with the breath of other passengers, and she feels her body start to betray her. Even though nothing is happening, there is an unmistakable feeling that something catastrophic is about to happen—heart racing, chest tightening. Since she was seven or eight years old, she has experienced panic attacks. She is sixty-two now. That’s over fifty years of a nervous system that ignites too frequently and too hotly in areas that most people hardly notice. The…

One image from May 17, 2026, Norway’s National Day, sticks in your memory. Crown Princess Mette-Marit is greeting lines of schoolchildren as they march past with flags while standing outside Skaugum, her family’s home close to Oslo. She has a thin nasal cannula running across her face that is connected to a small portable oxygen unit, and she is wearing a coat rather than the traditional bunad because her doctors told her that this year’s regional costume was too much. A chair has been subtly positioned off to one side. She sits down a few times during the ceremony. She…

Diane Hastings’ poise was the first thing that most people noticed about her. Glamorous and calm, she was the type of person who could enter a space and seem completely comfortable. This is why the diagnosis was so confusing for everyone around her, not just for her. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003 at the age of 39. 65 is the average age at diagnosis. In no way would Diane have chosen to be decades ahead of the curve. It began with a minor, nearly insignificant thing. Her left hand trembled a little. She couldn’t quite put her…

Something about Matt Biggs’ description of chemotherapy—”being sprayed with weedkiller”—tells you almost everything you need to know about him. It wasn’t arrogance. It wasn’t forced optimism. Even as his body was being disassembled by treatment, it was a gardener reaching for the language he knew best. Biggs was given a bowel cancer diagnosis in December 2020, and scans were clear for a short while following surgery in 2021. Then the cancer came back, settling into his lungs and liver with the kind of silent persistence that makes oncologists cautious about what they say. Over the next five years, there was…

Dennis Locorriere spent decades living inside a certain type of fame that fades gradually, almost gently. His name was unknown to most people who hummed “Sylvia’s Mother” in the back of a car. The man that audiences kept mistaking for the lead singer, Ray Sawyer, was identified by the cowboy hat and eye patch. You can see why Locorriere once acknowledged that the confusion was upsetting to him. It was his voice. He was mostly responsible for carrying the hits. However, he remained somewhat detached from his own achievements for years. After what his management described as a protracted and…