Legendary actor Danny Glover revealed some sad news to NBC’s Lester Holt in an exclusive interview. Glover, 79, revealed he’s been dealing with Alzheimer’s disease for multiple years. Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, is a neurodegenerative disease that progessively gets worse over time as it kills nerves in the brain, forcing memory loss, physical motor issues, among other things. More than 7,000,000 over the age of 65 are dealing with the disease.
“I think it’s really important for him to have control of his own narrative, of his own life story,” Glover’s daughter said “That’s really important. It’s important because people ask questions sometimes, and I don’t want to be a dishonest person and say, ‘Oh, yeah, everything is all right. It’s all great.” Glover, who is speaking up for the first time in the media, has been attending community events in San Francisco while also working heavily with the Alzheimer’s Association to help bring awareness to the disease.
Glover, of course, has become a beloved character actor over the course of nearly five decades. Best known for his role as Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon series, Glover broke out for his role opposite Sally Field in 1984’s Places of the Heart, before following it up with memorable roles in Witness, Silverado, and The Color Purple in 1985. Other film credits to his name include Predator 2, The Prince of Egypt, The Royal Tenenbaums, Saw, Dreamgirls, and The Last Black Man in San Francisco, the last of which gave him a lot of late career critical acclaim, and was a very personal project for the San Francisco native.
Glover receieved the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 2021 Academy Awards for his work in the late ‘90s with U.N. UNICEF in the ‘00s, and starting his own production studio to help share socially conscious stories about marginalized communities. Glover noted his parents and the Montgomery bus boycotts of the ‘50s as the inspriation to help others. “We have challenges in the world,” Glover said on TODAY. “ I think art becomes a reframe, a way of looking at that, you know?” While Glover soon may not be able to reflect on his life, he carries such an enduring legacy every day that people around the world will continue to do it for generations.
DSR/CBC would like to wish Glover all of the best.
Jameus Mooney is an entertainment writer and editor for Comic Book Clique, having covered the entertainment industry for years. You can follow him on Twitter here, and Letterboxd here. You can also listen to his horror podcast, The 2:17 Horror Podcast, at the DeathArts XIII YouTube channel.
Photo credit: Warner Bros.