Several actresses have come forth to reveal their struggles with bipolar disorder. Rene Russo (Major League, Lethal Weapon, Tin Cup) is the latest. Other notable actresses include Catherine Zeta-Jones (Entrapment, Traffic), Carrie Fisher (Stars Wars) and Linda Hamilton who is best known as Sarah Connor in Terminator. Back in the day, Vivien Leigh, the Oscar-winning actress who played Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind was said to have suffered with bipolar disorder. As her friend Sheridan Morley revealed in a BBC documentary: “In her day there were no pills, there were no clinics, there were no publicists, there was nobody between Vivien and an outside world which she found chilly, hostile, and sometimes, because of her mental state, could not cope with.”
There seem to be fewer male than female actors with the disorder. Only three on record. Richard Dreyfuss, Russell Brand and Jean-Claude Van Damme, the Belgian kickboxer turned action film star (Sudden Death, Universal Soldier). Van Damme was divorced four times, charged with spousal abuse, and addicted to cocaine before his diagnosis of “rapid-cycling bipolar.” He told E! Online, “You just have to take a little salt [the drug sodium valproate], and since I’m doing that it’s, like, BOOM! In one week, I felt it kick in. All the commotion around me, all the water around me, moving left and right around me, became like a lake.”
