Fears, phobias and emotional disorders. They hit every segment of the population. So when you start thinking that someone else “has it made”, you may or may not be correct. Here are just some of the problems of the rich, famous and otherwise well known.
Fears, Phobias
Alexander the Great, conquerer – cats
Muhammad Ali, boxing champ – flying
Kim Basinger, actress – wide, open spaces
Napoleon Bonaparte, French general – cats
Ray Bradbury, science fiction author – flying
Julius Caesar, Roman emperor – cats
Johnny Cash, singer-songwriter – flying & snakes
Chevy Chase, comic actor – snakes
John Cheever, writer – crossing bridges
Cher, singer-actress – flying
Joan Crawford, actress – germs
Tony Curtis, actor – flying
Florence Henderson, actress-singer – flying
Aretha Franklin, singer – flying
Whoopi Goldberg, actress-commedienne – flying
Betty Grable, actress – crowds
Houdini, magician – tight spaces (claustrophic)
Howard Hughes, millionaire-inventor – germs
Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter – flying
Bob Newhart, actor-comedian – flying
Glenda Jackson, actress, – flying>
Michael Jackson, singer – germs
John Madden, sportscaster – flying
Dean Martin, singer-actor – elevators
Ed McMahon, TV talk show host – heights
Robert Mitchum, actor – crowds
Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator – cats
Laurence Olivier, actor-director – stagefright
Ronald Reagan, actor-former President – flying & tight spaces
Anne Rice, author – the dark
Steven Spielberg, producer-director – insects
Billy Bob Thorton, actor-screenwriter – flying
Natalie Wood, actress – water (hydrophobic)
Joanne Woodward, actress – flying
Celebrities with Bipolar Disorder:
(exhibiting manic-depressive tendencies)
Patty Duke, actress
Connie Francis, singer
Peter Gabriel, singer
Kristy McNichols, actress
Spike Mulligan, comic actor
Charley Pride, singer
Axl Rose, singer
Ted Turner, entrepreneur
Robin Williams, actor-comedian
Celebrities with Unipolar Disorder:
(exhibiting manic or depressive tendencies)
Roseanne Barr, comedienne-talk show host (also obsessive-compulsive)
Dick Cavett, writer-talk show host
Tony Dow, actor-director
Kitty Dukakis, Massachusetts first lady
James Taylor, singer-songwriter
Mike Wallace, TV journalist
Famous People with Depression & Panic-Anxiety:
Charlotte Bronte, author
Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet
Nikola Tesla, inventor
People in the Arts with Bipolar Disorder:
(exhibiting manic-depressive tendencies)
Hans Christian Andersen author
Honore de Balzac, author
James Barrie, author
Irving Berlin, composer
Hector Berlioz, composer
William Blake, poet
Anton Bruckner, composer
Robert Burns, poet
Lord Byron, poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet
Joseph Conrad, author
Charles Dickens, author
Emily Dickinson, poet
Isak Dinesen, author
T.S. Eliot, poet
Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet
William Faulkner, author
F. Scott Fitzgerald, author
Stephen Foster, composer
Paul Gauguin, artist
Vincent van Gogh, artist
George Frederic Handel, composer
Ernest Hemingway, author
Hermann Hesse, author
Gustav Holst, composer
Victor Hugo, author
Henrik Ibsen, author
Henry James, author
John Keats, poet
Gustav Mahler, composer
Herman Melville, author
Michelangelo, artist
Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet
Charles Mingus, composer-musician
Edvard Munch, artist
Modest Mussorgsky, composer
Georgia O’Keeffe, artist
Eugene O’Neill, author
Charles Parker, composer-musician
Boris Pasternak, author
Sylvia Plath, author-poet
Cole Porter, composer-musician
Ezra Pound, poet
Sergei Rachmaninoff, composer
Robert Schumann, composer
Alexander Scriabin, composer
Mary Shelley, author
Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet
Robert Louis Stevenson, author
Peter Tchaikovsky, composer
Dylan Thomas, poet
Leo Tolstoy, author
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), author
Walt Whitman, poet
Tennessee Williams, author
Mary Wollstonecraft, author
Virginia Woolf, author