In her autobiography (“What Falls Away: A Memoir“), Mia Farrow (above) calls the day when she was diagnosed with polio “the day my childhood ended.” It happened the day after her 9th birthday and marked the beginning of a long illness that she remembers included time spent in an iron long, spinal taps, and other wardmates crying and screaming in pain (via New Mobility). Farrow eventually recovered completely and many years later became an advocate for polio vaccination in Africa and adopted a polio survivor from an orphanage in Calcutta, India (per New York Post). 

Actor Donald Sutherland battled many illnesses as a child, including rheumatic fever, hepatitis, and polio. He spent months bedridden as a result, which he credits with helping him develop a deep love for reading and eventually acting. According to Biography, one of the first words Sutherland learned to say was “neck,” to point out the pain he was feeling as polio was starting to take hold. He recovered well and had no lasting effects from it, except that one of his legs is shorter than the other.

Hollywood director Francis Ford Coppola contracted polio when he was 9 and spent the next year and a half “hiding” at home. In an interview with the Academy of Achievement, Coppola commented that “people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while. And so I basically watched television, and listened to the radio, and played with a tape recorder, and puppets, and my day was made up of those kinds of things.” 

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