Famous People with Cerebral Palsy

Chris Nolan

Chris Nolan - Christopher Nolan is an Irish author. He moved to Dublin for an education.He was educated at the Central Remedial Clinic School, Mount Temple Comprehensive School and at Trinity College, Dublin. He was born with cerebral palsy, from birth complications, and wrote using a special computer. He had been deprived of oxygen for two hours when he was born. Eventually, the doctors discovered a drug that allowed him to move one muscle in his neck so they attached this unicorn device to his forehead and he learned to type. Nolan has never spoken or signed a word in his life, yet his poetry has been compared to that of Joyce, Keats, and Yeats. At the age of 15,he wrote his first book, Dam-Burst of Dreams.With the three acclaimed books he produced, Christopher Nolan proved himself a significant Irish literary figure. With his lifelong struggle against cerebral palsy he proved himself a man of almost superhuman fortitude. He could not speak or move, his condition being so severe that moving his eyes was virtually his only means of communicating unaided. Typing a single word took minutes: his mother had to cup his head in her hands while he tapped at a typewriter with a stick attached to his forehead. When he received a Whitbread Prize at the age of 21,he wrote exultantly: “I want to shout with joy. My heart is full of gratitude. You all must realise that history is now in the making.Crippled man has taken his place on the world’s literary stage.” It meant that a figure with no physical voice was able to express himself with remarkable lucidity in print; that a man with no physical command over his body was able to triumphantly display what he called his only gift, his exceptional command of language.

Jerry Traylor

Jerry Traylor - A motivational speaker with cerebral palsy. He is the only person to jog across America on crutches. Traylor spent nearly a year in the hospital when he was 6 years old. When crutches replaced the braces holding his legs at age 14, Traylor said he experienced a sense of freedom that was unbelievable.

He took physical education classes of golf and bowling. He played intramural football and basketball. Physical activity was a real blessing after being confined to the hospital through 14 surgeries as a child. Traylor has also participated in the running of 35 marathons, climbed to the top of 14,110 foot Pike’s Peak, parachuting and other adventures.

Nationally known, Jerry has spoken to over 1 million people in more than 4000 audiences. He has been voted best speaker at a New Jersey State Quality Conference.He uses his personal life struggles with cerebral palsy as the leverage to deal with obstacles.He brings a majority of his listeners to their feet.

Christy Brown

Christy Brown - (June 5, 1932 – September 6, 1981) was an Irish author, painter and poet. The Academy Award winning film My Left Foot profiled his life. Christy Brown had cerebral palsy and was incapable for years of deliberate movement or speech. Doctors considered him to be mentally disabled as well. However, his mother continued to speak to him, work with him, and try to teach him until he famously snatched a piece of chalk from his sister with his left foot to make a mark on the floor. He was about five years old and only his left foot responded to his will. His mother then taught him the alphabet and he laboriously copied each letter, holding chalk between his toes. He learned to spell out words and finally to read.

Gradually, Christy withdrew into a life of the mind and had less and less in common with his brothers in his age group. His mother persuaded the family to build him a small, separate house in their back yard. It became his studio, where he could withdraw for peace and quiet, away from his siblings and their spouses and children.

Brown switched from reading to writing and from writing to painting. Then he decided to write his autobiography. As he had no formal education and had read only Dickens, he wrote in a florid and old-fashioned style. He dictated hundreds of pages to two of his brothers, but the result was unreadable even for him. Eventually he asked Dr. Collis for help. Dr. Collis was a published author and poet, who could and did provide valuable instruction in the art of writing as well as encouragement. One command was to read modern authors; another, to avoid clichés. In 1964, after the publication of My Left Foot, Christy worked for the Disabled Artists Association, producing on average one painting a week for over five years. He left the DAA after the publication of the tremendously successful Down All the Days (1970).

He married his nurse, Mary Carr, on October 5, 1973.At the age of 49, Brown died on September 7, 1981.

Anne McDonald

Anne McDonald - An Australian author and an activist for the rights of people with communication disability. As a result of a birth injury she developed Cerebral Palsy. She was diagnosed as having severe intellectual disability and at the age of three was placed by her parents in St. Nicholas Hospital, Melbourne, a Health Commission (government) institution for people with severe disability, and lived there without education or therapy for eleven years. Once Anne was able to make her wishes known she sought her discharge from St. Nicholas. Her parents and the hospital authorities denied her request on the grounds that the reality of her communication had not been established. In 1979, when Anne turned eighteen, she commenced a habeas corpus action in the Supreme Court of Victoria against the Health Commission in order to win the right to leave the institution. The court accepted that Anne McDonald’s communication was her own and allowed her to leave the hospital and live with Rosemary Crossley. After leaving the institution Anne got her HSC (University entrance) qualification at night school and went on to take a humanities degree at Deakin University, completed in 1993. She has written a number of articles and papers on disability, has spoken at a number of conferences, and has been active in the disability rights movement, with special emphasis on the right to communicate.

Anne wrote her story in Annie’s Coming Out, a book she co-authored with Rosemary Crossley in 1980 (the film Annie’s Coming Out based on the book won several Australian Film Institute awards and was released in the U.S. under the title Test of Love). On the night of the 3rd December 2008 Anne received the Personal Achievement Award in the Australian 2008 National Disability Awards at the Australian Federal Parliament House as part of that years International Day of Disabled Persons.