The 75th Emmy Awards on Monday night celebrated many wonderful moments, including the first time two women of colour won comedy acting awards. One stand out moment came when veteran television actor Christina Applegate walked onstage to present the award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a comedy series.
Before presenting the award to the evening’s winner (Ayo Edebiri, for her role in The Bear), Applegate was introduced by the show’s host Anthony Anderson, who said the actor had made her television debut at the age of one. “She grew up on TV,” he said.
As the 52-year-old actor walked on stage with a cane, she was applauded by an audience who rose to their feet.
“Thank you so much! Oh my God! You’re totally shaming me [and my] disability by standing up,” she joked. “Body not by Ozempic.”
“Some of you may know me as Kelly Bundy from Married… with Children,” she continued, as the audience gave her another round of applause. “We don’t have to applaud every time I do something,” she said.
“Or [as] Samantha from Samantha Who, or probably, maybe my last job… Jen Harding, from Dead to Me.”
“But very few of you probably know me from that debut…I’m going to cry more than I’ve been crying — Baby Bert Grizzle, from Days of our Lives.”
A photo of Applegate as a baby was displayed on the screen behind her.
The Primetime Emmy Award winner revealed her multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis in August 2021, while she was filming Dead to Me.
In November the following year, she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, appearing alongside her Married…with Children co-stars Katey Sagal and David Faustino, and her Dead To Me co-star Linda Cardellini.
“This day means more to me than you can possibly imagine,” she said at the time. “I don’t say that I have friends. I have family. These people take care of me. They take care of me every day of my life, and without them I don’t know what I would do.”
In May 2023, she opened up to Vanity Fair in a candid interview, saying that living with MS “f**king sucks.”
“You just have little s****y days…people are like, “Well, why don’t you take more showers?” she said. “Well, because getting in the shower is frightening. You can fall, you can slip, your legs can buckle. Especially because I have a glass shower. It’s frightening to me to get in there.”
“There are just certain things that people take for granted in their lives that I took for granted. Going down the stairs, carrying things – you can’t do that anymore.”
“It f**king sucks. I can still drive my car short distances. I can bring up food to my kid. Up, never down.”
“I can’t even imagine going to set right now,” she said. “This is a progressive disease. I don’t know if I’m going to get worse. I actually don’t want to be around a lot of people because I’m immunocompromised.”
“I also don’t want a lot of stimulation of the nervous system because it can be a little bit too much for me. I like to keep it as quiet and as mellow as possible.”
The main symptoms of MS include fatigue, pain, brain fog and impairment in different areas of the body. There is currently no cure for the disease, however treatments are available to help control the condition and ease the symptoms.
In 2018, actor Selma Blair was diagnosed with MS. She told British Vogue she’d experienced the symptoms of the disease for four decades before she was officially diagnosed.
“If you’re a boy with those symptoms, you get an MRI,” she said. “If you’re a girl, you’re called ‘crazy.'” After her diagnosis, Blair underwent a hematopoietic stem cell transplant in 2019. Since 2021, the MS has been in remission.