Charlie Sheen

Actor Charlie Sheen is best known for his starring role on CBS’ long-running hit show, Two and a Half Men. While Sheen is recognized today as a celebrated star of stage and screen, he has had to overcome his own struggle with stuttering to achieve success as an actor.

Friend and former co-star Jon Cryer recalled Sheen’s struggle with stuttering in his new memoir, Well That Happened. According to an article in The Telegraph, Cryer wrote that Sheen became nervous when they had to do table reads for Two and a Half Men, “because he used to have a stutter as a kid.”

Charlie Sheen was born Carlos Irwin Estevez in 1965, to actor Martin Sheen and wife Janet Templeton. He was bitten by the acting bug at a young age, when he was given a small part in his father’s film The Execution of Private Slovik in 1974.

In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2012, Sheen spoke candidly about the events he believes may have triggered his stuttering: “I was in second or third grade and Emilio was in sixth grade and we were waiting to be picked up. And these two kids were just awful, awful kids, so mean and violent. They didn’t do anything to us. But the stuff they described they were going to do was even worse.” According to Rolling Stone, Sheen started having panic attacks and then, one day, he found himself stuttering.

“Picture this,” Sheen said. “In school, they call on you, and out of nowhere – I just stopped answering. I knew all the answers, but I stopped raising my hand. I got real quiet for the longest time.”

Sheen attended Santa Monica High School in California, where he showed an early interest in acting, making amateur Super 8 films with his brother Emilio and school friends Rob Lowe and Sean Penn under his birth name. A few weeks before graduation, Sheen was expelled from school for poor grades and attendance. Deciding to become an actor, he then followed in his father’s footsteps and took on the stage name Charlie Sheen.

Sheen’s film career began in earnest in 1984 with a part in the Cold War film Red Dawn Patrick Swayze. From there, Sheen went on to star in feature films like Platoon and Wall Street with his father Martin Sheen.

In 2000, Charlie Sheen made his small screen debut when he replaced Michael J. Fox on the popular sitcom Spin City. For this role, Sheen won a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy. In 2003, Sheen was cast as Charlie Harper in the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men. Sheen played Harper for eight seasons and became the highest-paid actor on television, before being dismissed from the show in 2011.

Sheen touched on his childhood stuttering problem at a performance on his national tour in Cleveland in 2011: “Stuttering taught me how to listen, which we all have forgotten about.”

Despite the occasional bout of celebrity antics, Charlie Sheen remains a successful actor and powerful advocate for the stuttering community. Sheen’s candid comments on his struggle with stuttering serve as proof that people who stutter can still go on to achieve success in professional fields that require acting or public speaking. With the choice to share his personal experiences, Sheen lends a high-profile voice to those who may struggle to speak for themselves.

Posted April 14, 2015

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CELEBRITY FOCUS

Bruce Willis

While the world knows Bruce Willis as an A-list actor, few know that he struggled with stuttering throughout his first 20 years.

Walter Bruce Willis was born in 1955 in West Germany to his German mother, Marlene, and his American GI father, David Willis. The family settled in David’s hometown of Penns Grove, New Jersey in 1957, and the couple has three other children.

Bill Walton

From BillWalton.com

Thank you for your interest in my life long problem with my speech and communication skills. I was a very shy and reserved young man who could not speak at all without severely stuttering until I was 28 years old. Always a success in the classroom and on the basketball court, I took refuge in the things that I did well as a youngster. A straight A student, my athletic abilities covered the deficiencies that limited my overall growth and development. The game of basketball was my religion, the gym my church. It was a convenient way of avoiding my responsibilities of developing my human relation skills.

When I was 28, a chance encounter at a social event with Hall of Fame broadcaster Marty Glickman completely changed my life in so many ways that things have never been the same since, nor have they ever been better. That day, in a very brief, private conversation (one way, mind you, since I literally could not speak at the time) Marty explained, patiently and concisely, that talking, communicating was a skill not a gift or a birthright and that like any skill, whether it be sports, music, business or whatever, needed to be developed over a lifetime of hard work, discipline, organization and practice. Marty gave me some simple tips that day and then encouraged me to take those keys and apply them to methods of learning that I had received from the special teachers that I had come across in my life, particularly the 6 Hall of Fame basketball coaches that I had played for throughout my career. The beginning of my whole new life was as simple as that. No gimmicks, tricks or shortcuts. Just the realization that with some help, guidance and a lot of hard work that I too could do what seemed so easy, simple and natural to everyone else, yet seemed impossibly out of my reach and comprehension.

Lewis Carroll

The recent Disney version of Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice in Wonderland, garnered a great deal of media hype. Even though the mainstream media has not made mention that Carroll was a person who stuttered, his family history gives credence to the discovery of the genetic link to stuttering. Carroll was born to parents who were first cousins; almost all of their eleven children, three girls and seven boys, struggled with stuttering past childhood.

Kenyon Martin

Kenyon Martin, the basketball sensation who was named to the NBA’s All Star Team in 2004, joins other famous people who stutter in a new brochure. The brochure - which unfolds into a small poster - is available free of charge from The Stuttering Foundation.

The poster is intended to give children and adults who stutter inspiration as they grapple with their speech disorder.

Bob Love

Bob Love has dreamt about being a great public speaker since his early days in Bastrop Louisiana, even though, as a young man, he could barely put two words together, let alone speak a full sentence.

In spite of his severe stuttering disability, Bob Love, the son of a sharecropper, rose to become a Chicago Bulls NBA superstar, whose records were eventually surpassed by Michael Jordan. Throughout his entire athletic career, Bob Love kept his stuttering a secret from the fans who adored him, thinking he could do his “talking” on the basketball court.