On February 22nd, Julianne Moore won the best actress Oscar for her role as a university professor with Alzheimer's in "Still Alice".
In "Still Alice," the veteran actress plays a brilliant lecturer and beautiful redhead who is diagnosed with Alzheimer's at 50. The small budget film was picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures only in September, thanks to Moore's award-winning potential.
Last year, she said she was attracted to the role because she had never seen Alzheimer's portrayed from the point of view of the patient.
The film was adapted from the novel "Still Alice" by Lisa Genova and was directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland.
One of the most common signs of Alzheimer's is memory loss, especially forgetting recently learned information. Others include forgetting important dates or events; asking for the same information over and over; increasingly needing to rely on memory aids (e.g., reminder notes or electronic devices) or family members for things they used to handle on their own.
What's a typical age-related change?
Sometimes forgetting names or appointments, but remembering them later.
Two: Challenges in planning or solving problems
Some people may experience changes in their ability to develop and follow a plan or work with numbers. They may have trouble following a familiar recipe or keeping track of monthly bills. They may have difficulty concentrating and take much longer to do things than they did before.
What's a typical age-related change?
Making occasional errors when balancing a checkbook.
Even 40 years later, 83-year-old William Shatner is still known as Captain Kirk, the heroic starship leader on the 1960s TV series Star Trek. The show ran from 1966 until 1969 and spawned a franchise of TV shows, movies, comics and merchandise. Shatner played Kirk in a series of Star Trek movies after the show ended.
Shatner went on to prove his popularity as a cop in the series T.J. Hooker (1982-87), as the host of the reality TV show Rescue 911 (1989) and, since the late 1990s, as that guy in those Priceline.com ads. Shatner appeared as slick lawyer Denny Crane in the final season of the TV series The Practice (2003-04), then had even more success with the role in the spin-off series Boston Legal (2004-08, with James Spader). He began hosting Shatner's Raw Nerve, an interview show on The Biography Channel, in 2009. The next year he began appearing as a cranky dad in the series $#*! My Dad Says. William Shatner is also the author of the TekWar series of science fiction novels. He published an autobiography, Up Till Now, in 2008.
