Curated playlist
Actors with dyslexia
- Orlando BloomOrlando Bloom was named after Orlando Gibbons, an English composer of the 16th century. He was born in Canterbury, Kent, on the 13th of January 1977. Nothing about that start pointed toward a screen career. Some consider him the Errol…
- Jennifer AnistonJennifer Aniston, the American actress, once approached a television executive at a Los Angeles gas station and asked him for reassurance. She was depressed. Four of her television shows had failed, and she wanted someone in the business…
- Zoe SaldañaZoe Saldaña is the highest grossing actor in history, a title that sits oddly beside a childhood spent speaking Spanish at home in Queens. In 2023, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Her road to…
- Tom CruiseTom Cruise attended fifteen schools in fourteen years. He was born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on the 3rd of July 1962 in Syracuse, New York. Today he is an American actor and film producer, and his career has now run for forty-five years. A…
- CherCher, the American singer and actress born Cheryl Sarkisian, first reached radio in 1964 with a record that programmers misjudged. The single was “Ringo, I Love You,” produced by Phil Spector and released under the name Bonnie Jo Mason.…
- River PhoenixRiver Phoenix was an American actor and musician, and at the 92nd Academy Awards his brother Joaquin spoke one of River's lyrics aloud. Accepting the Best Actor prize, Joaquin told the room that River wrote it at 17: "run to the rescue…
- Mark RuffaloMark Ruffalo has been nominated four times for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, which ties a record. Each nomination came for a different kind of man. Ruffalo is an American actor and producer, and the road to that record was…
- Robbie WilliamsRobbie Williams walked onto a stage at Knebworth on the 1st of August 2003 and faced a crowd of 125,000 people. He then did it again on the 2nd and the 3rd. Three consecutive nights, with that many people each time, made it the biggest…
- Keanu ReevesKeanu Reeves ended a 2019 late-night interview with a single sentence about death: “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” The studio audience reacted emotionally, and host Stephen Colbert shook his hand before closing the show.…
- Arnold SchwarzeneggerArnold Schwarzenegger broke into a locked gym on weekends as a teenager. He later became California's governor.
- Maya HawkeMaya Ray Thurman Hawke was born on the 8th of July 1998 in New York City, and her story starts on a film set before she existed. Her parents, the actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, met while making Gattaca in 1997. They married in May…
- Tom HollandTom Holland, the English actor, has led films that together have grossed more than $9.9 billion worldwide, according to The Numbers. That total places him among the highest-grossing film actors of all time. In 2019 he appeared on the…
- Idris ElbaIdris Elba spent a night locked alone in a cell on Robben Island. He did it to prepare to play Nelson Mandela.
- Robin WilliamsRobin Williams was voted "Most Likely Not to Succeed" by his high school classmates in 1969.
- Billy Bob ThorntonBilly Bob Thornton was working as a waiter at an industry event in Los Angeles when he found himself serving the film director Billy Wilder. Thornton struck up a conversation with him. Wilder's advice was simple: think about becoming a…
- Jamie Campbell BowerJamie Campbell Bower once needed up to eight hours of make-up work in a single day to become Vecna, the monstrous villain of the Netflix series Stranger Things. The man beneath the prosthetics is an English actor, singer, and guitarist. He…