Most actors have a few ups and downs, but Mark Ruffalo has truly been on a roller-coaster ride, says John Preston in the London Telegraph. In 2000, Ruffalo had been struggling in Hollywood for a decade when he appeared in the Oscar-nominated film You Can Count on Me. It was his big break. But one night, he dreamed he had a brain tumor. The dream turned out to be true, and though the tumor was nonmalignant, the operation to remove it left one side of his face paralyzed. “In all I disappeared for a year,” he says. “There were all kinds of rumors about what had happened to me, drugs, alcoholism, AIDS. Whatever the truth, I was damaged goods. I mean, no one is going to hire an actor with a paralyzed face.”
Ruffalo slowly recovered and rebuilt his career, until 2008, when his brother was murdered. Maddened by grief, he fired his agent and left Los Angeles. Then he was offered a part in The Kids Are All Right. Now, with an Oscar nomination under his belt, his career is back on track, but he doesn’t take success seriously. “If I walk around the house saying, ‘Hey I’m no longer a B actor!’ do you think that means anything to my kids? Of course not. They just give me this funny look and go: ‘Yeah, yeah, we want our breakfast.’”
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