By middle school, she had grown accustomed both to living with unexplained headaches and facial pain and to using alcohol to feel better, at least temporarily. (In Mean Baby, she spoke publicly for the first time about having been groomed and sexually assaulted by an influential dean there.) Her magistrate mother, who died in 2020, was glamorous, icy, and the center of Blair’s world her father, a lawyer, left the family when Blair was a teenager. Blair grew up in a Detroit suburb, the youngest of four girls, and attended Cranbrook Kingswood, an elite private school. This is not to say she’s had an easy ride. “I never had that competitive drive that would make me uncomfortable if I didn’t get a role,” she says. That kind of industry shoehorning might have made another person cynical about the business, but 20-plus years into her career, Blair remains unabashedly and earnestly enamored of it. She was featured on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood 2000 cover, but appeared behind the fold. In Legally Blonde and The Sweetest Thing, she was similarly cast as the dark-haired supporting foil to uniformly blonde leading ladies.
Her breakout role didn’t arrive until 1999’s Cruel Intentions, when she and Sarah Michelle Gellar sparked a generation’s sexual awakening with a famously salivary kiss. You have to show that you’re still alive.”īy Hollywood standards, Blair was a late bloomer. “I always say how visibility matters for the disabled,” she says. In my bedroom, on the floor that I’m used to, I can dance.” “I understand why people with MS spend a lot of time in their homes,” Blair writes in her memoir. “I’m not really a public-pleasure person.” But at 50, and in the wake of a life-changing diagnosis, Blair has turned outward, becoming a proactive figure advocating for inclusion and accessibility in an industry that rarely prioritizes these things. “I’m definitely more of an independent actress, or the strange oddball,” she says. While she still grapples with certain MS complications, Blair says she has “stopped losing abilities.” In September, she competed on DWTS for five weeks, joining a growing number of people with known disabilities to appear on the show.īlair has always fancied herself a supporting player in Hollywood.
The 2021 documentary Introducing, Selma Blair chronicled her life in the months following her diagnosis, as she prepared for a risky yet potentially life-altering stem cell transplant in the summer of 2019-a process Blair refers to as “rebooting the computer.” She is now in remission, meaning the disease is not progressing. Since her diagnosis, Blair has opened up about her health so frequently and freely that she’s rapidly become one of the most prominent faces of disability advocacy in Hollywood.
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