13 Celebrities With Dyslexia

Jennifer Aniston

In a 2015 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jennifer Aniston revealed she was diagnosed with dyslexia in her early 20s. “The only reason I knew [that I had it] was because I went to get a prescription for glasses,” she explained. “I had to wear these Buddy Holly glasses. One had a blue lens and one had a red lens. And I had to read a paragraph, and they gave me a quiz, gave me 10 questions based on what I’d just read, and I think I got three right. Then they put a computer on my eyes, showing where my eyes went when I read. My eyes would jump four words and go back two words, and I also had a little bit of a lazy eye, like a crossed eye, which they always have to correct in photos.”

In the years leading up to this life-changing optometry appointment, Aniston’s dyslexia heavily impacted her self-image and hindered her ability to perform well in school. Securing a diagnosis for her learning disorder, however, proved to be a profound turning point in Aniston’s life. “I thought I wasn’t smart. I just couldn’t retain anything,” she said. “Now I had this great discovery. I felt like all of my childhood trauma-dies, tragedies, dramas were explained.”

Tom Holland

Long before he became everyone’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, Tom Holland was diagnosed with dyslexia at seven years old. The diagnosis challenged Holland to persevere through learning difficulties in school and develop a strong work ethic, for which he credits his creativity and intuition as an accomplished actor. In a 2021 interview with 11-year-old YouTuber Jazlyn Guerra, Holland spoke to his struggles with dyslexia growing up, sharing a few words of advice for those experiencing the same challenges. “It’s just about taking your time, and giving yourself an appropriate amount of time to do the things you need to do,” he said. “The better prepared you are, the more you’ll be able to accomplish things that are fantastic.”

Cher

Long before she became a prolific songwriter and pop icon, Cher showed signs of dyslexia and dyscalculia, a learning disability that affects a person’s ability to understand numbers and mathematical equations. “I couldn’t read quickly enough to get all my homework done and for me, math was like trying to understand Sanskrit,” the singer wrote in her autobiography, The First Time. Instead, Cher learned through listening; however, her teachers did not recognize her efforts in the classroom and felt that she wasn’t living up to her full potential. Discouraged, Cher dropped out of high school during her junior year and went to Hollywood to pursue an entertainment career.

It wasn’t until Cher took her then 10-year-old son Chaz Bono to be tested for dyslexia, which is genetic, that the star learned of her own dyslexia and dyscalculia diagnoses. “I told them how my mind raced ahead of my hand, how I’d skip letters in the middle of a word,” she said in The First Time. “I told them how I kept transposing numbers, and that I’d get so cranky trying to dial long-distance calls that someone would finally have to take the phone and dial the number for me . . . It was like a big, ‘Ohhhh…now I understand everything, why I had so much trouble with school’ [moment]. It all fit together.”

Whoopi Goldberg

Growing up, Whoopi Goldberg struggled to grasp lessons in the classroom, an experience that heavily impacted others’ perception of her intelligence. Though Goldberg knew she struggled more than other children, she also knew she was smart. “What I remember about being a kid was that I felt pretty protected, I wasn’t afraid, and I had a mother who understood after a while that there was something different about the way I learned,” Goldberg said at the Child Mind Institute’s 13th annual Adam Katz Memorial Conversation in 2016.

Though peers and teachers believed she was lazy, Goldberg was highly creative and had a vivid imagination that came to life when she heard stories. Goldberg, who wasn’t officially diagnosed with dyslexia until adulthood, later turned her love of stories and storytelling into an acting career. Reflecting on what her experience with dyslexia has been like, she added, “I think perhaps it made me more introspective. Made me more thoughtful, maybe slightly slower in how I do things because it takes me a minute sometimes to figure things out . . . If you’re the parent of a child like us, you can’t be timid, because you’re all we have.”

Keanu Reeves

Like many people with dyslexia, Keanu Reeves struggled to navigate the traditional educational system growing up. Over five years, Reeves attended four different high schools as a teenager and dropped out before he received his diploma. “Because I had trouble reading, I wasn’t a good student,” Reeves told Handbag Magazine in a 2005 interview, per a blog post from David Morgan Education. “I didn’t finish high school. I did a lot of pretending as a child. It was my way of coping with the fact that I didn’t really feel like I fit in.” Despite his struggles in school, Reeves retained a deep love for Shakespeare and even said he recites Shakespearean works to calm down occasionally, according to a 1994 interview with Seventeen, via David Morgan Education.

Keira Knightley

Keira Knightley learned she was dyslexic when she was six years old. Though her dyslexia made it difficult to read, write, and complete her schoolwork, Knightley said her mother, playwright and screenwriter Sharman Macdonald, played a huge role in helping her manage her learning disability. According to a 2012 interview with GQ. Macdonald obtained a copy of Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility screenplay and encouraged Knightley to read it to practice her literacy skills.

With the help of her mother and her teachers, Knightley learned ways to work around her dyslexia and build a successful acting career. Though it’s easier for her to read some days over others, Knightley said her dyslexia also manifests in the way she socializes, or doesn’t, on set. “If you give me a page of dialogue now, I can just about do it, but it jumps about — it takes me a while and I really need to learn it and sit with it,” she said in a 2018 interview with Made by Dyslexia. “I always have to say, ‘You cannot give me a rewritten scene on the day and think that I’m going to be able to perform it well. If you give me a rewritten scene the day before and I have a night to work on it, I will be able to do it well. I think I was really lucky that [my dyslexia] was diagnosed when I was six. That early diagnosis was key to absolutely everything. I think because of my dyslexia, my work ethic has always been really high”

Orlando Bloom

Orlando Bloom was first diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of seven. “When my mother told me that I was dyslexic it was both a gift and a bit of a cross to bear, but she tried to make me feel like it was something special and I was going to be great with it,” Bloom said in an interview with Dr. Harold Koplewicz at the Child Mind Institute’s Adam Katz Memorial Lecture in 2010. “But it was something that I hid from other kids as best I could.” 

Bloom explained that he struggled with reading and writing in the classroom as a child and was often distracted and angry. “I was frustrated with the learning disability,” he said. “It makes you feel stupid; you just don’t feel smart. Somewhere in me I knew that I was smart, I knew I wasn’t thick, but I was just really struggling with spelling and writing, and it was holding me back.” Bloom’s dyslexia also made it difficult to communicate his ideas verbally. With his mom’s encouragement and the help of a few drama school classes, however, Bloom learned to embrace his learning disability and channel his creativity into acting. “If you have kids who are struggling with dyslexia, the greatest gift you can give them is the sense that nothing is unattainable,” he added. “With dyslexia comes a very great gift, which is the way that your mind can think creatively.”

Steven Spielberg

Like many celebrities on this list, Steven Spielberg wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until he was an adult. By this point, Spielberg had already won three Emmys and three Academy Awards. After being diagnosed at 60 years old, Spielberg said he finally understood why he dreaded reading aloud in high school, and that he’d uncovered “the last puzzle piece to a great mystery that I’ve kept to myself.”

Though Spielberg’s dyslexia posed challenges for him at school, his mother and father, ensured that he received the help he needed to succeed. As a filmmaker, Spielberg says it takes him double or triple the time to read a script someone else might finish in an hour but he’s learned to adjust over time with practice. According to ADDitude Magazine, Spielberg’s message for other people with dyslexia is one of hope. “You are not alone, and while you will have dyslexia for the rest of your life, you can dart between the raindrops to get where you want to go,” he said. “It will not hold you back.”

Octavia Spencer

Octavia Spencer had been navigating dyslexia since childhood. As early as first or second grade, the star struggled to learn in the same way as her classmates, particularly when it came to reading aloud. “Reading aloud has always been a problem for me because I had a learning disability that I didn’t realize was a disability,” Spencer said of her dyslexia in a 2013 interview with Entertainment Weekly, per Understood.org. She added, “I was paralyzed with fear because I kept inverting words and dropping words. I didn’t want to be made to feel that I was not as smart as the other kids because I know that I am a smart person.”

Though reading and writing were difficult for her, Spencer was a strong auditory learner and was tested to join her school’s gifted program. “I just remember thinking differently,” Spencer said in a 2017 interview with The Oregonian, per Understood.org. “I could solve puzzles quicker than the average child. I would start with the mazes at the end and go to the front and be done in, like, 30 seconds. My deductive reasoning was very important.” Since her school days, Spencer has become an Academy Award-winning actor and harnessed her creative strengths to become a published children’s book author.

Gwen Stefani

In a 2020 interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, Gwen Stefani revealed that she and her two sons were all diagnosed with dyslexia at the same time. “One thing that I’ve discovered through having kids is that I have dyslexia — everyone has things that happen and mine was that,” Stefani said. “And I feel like a lot of the problems that I have had or even decisions that I’ve made for myself stem from that, because now the children — obviously, it’s all genetic — they have some of those issues.”

Despite her initial surprise after learning of her diagnosis, Stefani said she’s grateful her children have the resources to manage their dyslexia. “They have these incredible teachers and schools and they don’t have to have shame about it,” Stefani told Lowe. “They understand that their brain functions in a different way. All of our brains do.”

Looking back on her school days, Stefani said she now recognizes past signs of her dyslexia and acknowledges that her experience with the learning disability gave her strengths others did not have. “I was a good girl,” she said. “I didn’t do any bad stuff. It was just really hard for me to function in that square box of school that everybody was supposed to be understanding. And my brain didn’t work like that; it still doesn’t. But it works in different ways that are probably a gift that other people can’t do.”

Henry Winkler

When he was a child, Henry Winkler’s parents always pushed him to work harder, fearing that their son was not putting in the effort to learn. “They believed in education,” Winkler said, according to The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity. “They thought I was lazy. I was called lazy. I was called stupid. I was told I was not living up to my potential. And all the time inside I’m thinking, ‘I don’t think I’m stupid. I don’t want to be stupid. I’m trying as hard as I can. I really am.’”

After hours of rigorous studying, Winkler still struggled to retain information but he remained resilient, learning to work around his dyslexia and compensate with strong communication skills. “You learn to negotiate with your learning challenge,” he said. “I improvised. I never read anything the way that it was written in my entire life. I would read it. I could instantly memorize a lot of it and then what I didn’t know, I made up and threw caution to the wind and did it with conviction and sometimes I made them laugh and sometimes I got hired.”

Like many other parents with dyslexia, Winkler didn’t get an official diagnosis until he took his stepson Jed to be tested for a learning disability. Recognizing similarities between Jed’s behavior and his own, Winkler realized the term may also apply to him. “I went, “Oh my goodness. I have something with a name.’ That was when I first got it.” Since receiving his dyslexia diagnosis, Winkler has published the Hank Zipzer books, a children’s book series about a dyslexic child living in Manhattan, New York, where Winkler grew up.

Salma Hayek

Salma Hayek struggled with reading from an early age but wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until she was a teenager. Though her learning disability posed challenges during her school days, Hayek was always a good student and prided herself on being a fast learner. “I’m really a fast learner,” she said in a 2009 interview with WebMD. “I always was, which is maybe why in high school they didn’t realize I had dyslexia. I skipped years without studying too much.” Hayek also went on to study political science at the National University of Mexico.

Though her dyslexia made it difficult for her to land acting roles early on in her career, Hayek says she’s grateful for the challenge and all she’s learned from it. For example, “Some people read really fast, but you’ll ask them questions about the script and they’ll forget,” the actor said. “I take a long time to read a script, but I read it only once.”

Anderson Cooper

As guest emcee at the National Center for Learning Disabilities’s first annual luncheon in 2010, Anderson Cooper recalled struggling with dyslexia and trying to hide his learning difficulties from his peers. “I remember at the time being concerned that other people would find out about it,” he said, adding that the experience was isolating. 

In an essay for Oprah.com, Cooper added that his challenges with reading and writing also influenced how he behaved at home. “I grew up in a home where reading and writing had great value,” he said. “As a child, I had a problem reading. I had a mild form of dyslexia where I would see some letters backward, and I had to go to a special reading instructor. One way she helped was to encourage me to find books that I was really passionate about.” In the following years, Cooper encountered a handful of additional teachers who encouraged him to persevere through his learning difficulties and made his education more enjoyable. “It made all the difference in my life early on,” he added at the NCLD luncheon. “And the good news is that there are great schools out there, able to provide the necessary resources and support.”