SAN FRANCISCO — Danny Glover said the words the way he has learned to say hard things lately, evenly, without reaching for more emotion than the sentence needed. “I can live with it, in a sense.”
The actor, 79, told former NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt in an interview broadcast on TODAY Wednesday that he has been living with Alzheimer’s disease for several years, disclosing publicly for the first time a diagnosis his family has managed privately since 2022, according to a report from CBS News. Seated at his home in the Bay Area with several relatives beside him, Glover said the disease has already slowed his movement and his speech, and that he does not expect it to stop there. “I’m sure as it advances, things are going to be different and changing,” he said.
Variety and other entertainment outlets confirmed the account Wednesday alongside NBC’s broadcast. The admission carries weight beyond one man’s health. It arrives in a year when advocacy groups have pushed harder to change how the disease gets discussed, particularly in Black communities, where the Alzheimer’s Association calculates the risk of developing Alzheimer’s or another dementia at roughly twice the rate seen in white Americans, a gap researchers attribute to disparities in cardiovascular health, health care access and decades of under-enrollment in clinical studies. Glover, one of the most recognizable Black actors of his generation, is now one of the most prominent people to speak about that disparity in his own voice rather than as a statistic in someone else’s report.
His daughter, Mandisa, said the decision to go public was his to make and his alone, telling Holt it mattered to her that he retain control of his own narrative, of his own life story. His younger brother, Martin, described decades of looking up to Glover before admitting that the relationship has effectively reversed. “He took me under his wing, and I love him to death,” Martin said. “And I’m here to help him now.”
The striking detail in Wednesday’s interview was not the diagnosis itself but its timing. Glover had already been diagnosed when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Governors Awards in March 2022, an honor recognizing what the Academy called his decades of advocacy for justice and human rights. Audiences who watched him accept it that night, and the room that stood to applaud him, had no idea what he and his family already knew.
The Alzheimer’s Association, which was not involved in Wednesday’s disclosure, estimates more than 7 million Americans over 65 are currently living with the disease and notes that measurable cognitive decline can begin as much as 15 years before a diagnosis is made, a lag the group cites in pushing for earlier screening and for lifestyle interventions, managing blood pressure and diabetes, staying physically active, preserving sleep and social ties, that researchers say can slow onset without preventing it outright.
Glover built the public life now attached to that disparity over five decades, as Roger Murtaugh opposite Mel Gibson across four Lethal Weapon films, as Celie’s husband in The Color Purple, and in quieter, more political work he treated as seriously as the blockbusters, chairing the TransAfrica Forum, backing striking farmworkers and hotel employees, and narrating documentaries on causes the industry rarely funds, a career The Hollywood Reporter has chronicled in detail. He has a role waiting in a planned biopic of the singer Dionne Warwick, though neither Glover nor his representatives said Wednesday whether the diagnosis changes those plans.
The disclosure lands three weeks after WABC anchor Bill Ritter stepped down from a 25-year run on Eyewitness News following his own early-stage Alzheimer’s diagnosis, another instance of a familiar public face choosing to name the disease rather than let colleagues and viewers speculate quietly about a slower voice or a missed cue.
The pattern extends beyond neurological disease. X-Men actor Tyler Mane’s decision this summer to reveal his own male breast cancer diagnosis reflected a similar calculation, that silence protects no one, and costs the performer control over how their own story eventually gets told by somebody else.
The comparison Hollywood reaches for first is Bruce Willis, whose family disclosed his frontotemporal dementia in 2023 after an earlier aphasia diagnosis. Glover’s team drew a distinction Wednesday: this is his own account, delivered in his own voice while he can still give it, not a statement issued later on a relative’s behalf.
Glover did not say Wednesday how far the disease has progressed, and his family offered no timeline for what comes next, only that they intend to keep answering when people ask. “They’ve got my back,” Glover said of the relatives seated around him, and for now that arrangement, not a prognosis, is the only certainty anyone connected to him is offering.
