Selma Blair: Didn’t want to be seen as an “insurance risk”.

Selma Blair
Didn’t want to be seen as an “insurance risk”.

Selma Blair (50) was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) around five years ago, decades after the first symptoms had appeared. Now the actress decorates it Cover of British Vogue and speaks openly to the fashion magazine about her illness.

Selma Blair started having symptoms when she was seven

Already at the age of seven have Blair according to the cover story her right eye and left leg can no longer be used, and she also had problems with her urinary bladder. It was therefore a sign of childhood multiple sclerosis, but at the time Blair was rejected by the doctors as a self-promoter. She lived with the disease for around 40 years before it was finally diagnosed. In 2018 she made it public that she suffers from multiple sclerosis. She had only recently received the diagnosis.

How she is doing today varies from day to day. On a good one she can laugh and spend time with friends, on a bad one she throws up and spends the day in bed. She couldn’t eat anything for days. “I need more sleep than a bear does in winter,” says Blair.

Today she can work around the restrictions that the disease brings with it. Nevertheless, everything can still be “overwhelming”. Due to the illness, she has traveled less than she would like in recent years. At home she has an assistance dog named Scout, but she cannot take it with her when she travels, such as to London Fashion Week. Instead, she was joined by her son Arthur, 11, who Blair has with her former partner Jason Bleick.

Selma Blair didn’t want to be “discovered”.

The many years without a proper diagnosis were therefore extremely difficult for Blair, who now mostly appears in public with a walking stick – also on the new “Vogue” cover. When her career flourished thanks to films like “Ice Cold Angels” (1999) or “Hellboy (2004), the actress hid how she was doing. She had alcohol problems, took medication: “I was lost and sad and could hardly ever smile.”

Blair was afraid that she would no longer be able to work and that she might be “discovered”. “The vomiting or the problems with my body were terrifying,” as were the rashes and baldness she suffered from.

She was also repeatedly misdiagnosed. Blair can remember, for example, that she felt very bad on the set of “Hellboy”. It was assumed in Prague that she was suffering from cat scratch disease and possibly leukemia. And despite all that, she couldn’t talk to anyone about it, not about the alcohol problems and not about the treatments she was undergoing. She was “afraid that I could be considered an insurance risk”.

Blair left the film industry after filming Kath & Kim in 2009. She “lost most of my hair and all of my energy”. She spent many days in bed, crying, sometimes drinking and visiting doctors. “I almost gave up until the diagnosis,” says the actress. “I was always afraid that I would be seen as incompetent – or as mentally ill.” Her mother taught her that this could end a woman’s career.

A new man alongside Selma Blair?

Among other things, Blair now enjoys walking her dog. “I’m so thankful for the peaceful hours now,” she says. The 50-year-old is “open” to a new man by her side, but she has gotten used to “not expecting much”. She is not asked about dates and she no longer wants to make compromises: “I’m happy with what I have […]. I like brilliant people. I could use a brilliant man to love me. Perhaps. I don’t know it…”

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