Lucille Ball
The red-headed comedienne became very ill with an RA-like disease in her late teens, while trying to make her way as a model. Although doctors at the time diagnosed her with RA, some question whether the First Lady of Television truly had the disease. (Blood tests for RA were not available until years later, and Ball never developed joint deformities.)After she recovered from the severe flare-up and leg pain so intense it kept her from walking, Ball moved to Hollywood to launch her film and movie career.
Rosalind Russell
Russell enjoyed a long, successful career on stage and screen. But by the late 1960s, serious health problems, including severe RA, forced her to retire from acting. Russell was open about her struggle with the disease and served on a national commission to investigate it. In 1978, two years after Russell’s death from breast cancer at age 69, Congress honored her efforts by founding the Rosalind Russell Medical Research Centre for Arthritis at the University of California at San Francisco.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The French Impressionist is probably the first well-documented case of RA in history, according to Dr. Hadler. Toward the end of Renoir’s life, he was often unable to paint due to severe bouts of the disease that had forced his hands to contract into claws. But Renoir continued to work, at times tying his paintbrush to his hand so he could keep painting. The artist had malignant RA, meaning the disease had spread beyond the joints to affect the skin, nerves, blood vessels, and even the internal organs; the disease contributed to his death at 78.
Kathleen Turner
The actress learned she had severe RA in her mid-40s in 1993. In her 2008 autobiography, Send Yourself Roses, she described how the illness led her to dependence on alcohol. She says exercise has helped her cope, while medication is keeping it under control. She urges others to get a blood test as early as possible.
Peter Paul Rubens
The famous seventeenth-century Flemish artist may have had rheumatoid arthritis. Rubens complained of 'gouty rheumatism' which left him bedridden at times, but some experts believe his symptoms were more likely due to RA. Also, the hands of people in the paintings he made in the last 30 years of his life appear to show the characteristic swelling and deformity of progressive RA. Dr Hadler, however, believes this is a stylistic issue, and not a depiction of swollen joints.
Christian Bernard
Famous for performing the first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967, the South African ended his surgical career in 1983 when RA in his hands made it impossible for him to continue operating. Bernard was first diagnosed with RA in 1956. An outspoken critic of apartheid, he said he never wond the Nobel Prize because he was 'a white South African'.
