There was a time in the mid 2000s when Christina Applegate had the world at her feet.
On screen, she had cemented her acting career with a leading role on hit Fox TV show Married… With Children, and an Emmy-winning guest appearance as Rachel’s sister on Friends.
Off screen, her social status was equally secure: she had dated Brad Pitt, and befriended Johnny Depp. A founding member of The Pussycat Dolls burlesque troupe, alongside Christina Aguilera and Carmen Electra, with a Tony nod for Best Actress in the Broadway revival of Sweet Charity, she had a life to envy.
Today, it all looks so very different. It is understood that, since late March, the 54-year-old star has been in hospital – the latest chapter in her five-year battle with multiple sclerosis (MS).
For her friends, it is an agonizing turn of events and part of the hellish reality with which they, and she, must increasingly live.
One source close to the situation told the Daily Mail: ‘With every setback, if we are being realistic, everyone has it in the back of their minds that they might not have a tomorrow with her.’
Christina Applegate described her five-year battle with multiple sclerosis (MS) as ‘a living hell’
Applegate posted this photo in bed with her book, You with the Sad Eyes: A Memoir, on Instagram in March
In 2021, she received the devastating news of her MS diagnosis
The source explained: ‘Christina is a fighter, but her battle with MS has been treacherous. She has better days and really bad days; she doesn’t have great days. She’s always dealing with something. It sucks.
‘But when she does look at things positively it makes her feel better in the moment because she has so many friends that are there for her, even to listen to her, cry with her and anything in between.’
In truth Appelgate’s decline has been agonizing. Back in 2024, she admitted her largely bed-bound life was ‘a living hell.’
‘I don’t enjoy living,’ she told a podcast. ‘I don’t enjoy things anymore.’
One can only imagine what her existence is like now.
‘She’s in rough shape,’ our source admitted. ‘But people aren’t thinking that this is the end.
‘Nobody is planning to be at a funeral. Granted, her disease will take her sooner than anyone would like it to be, but everyone has trust in her medical team and her will to live.’
Certainly that will has been tested before. In March this year, Applegate published a memoir, You With The Sad Eyes, which told of her child stardom – she received her Screen Actors Guild membership card at the age of five – and her seemingly gilded existence. But it also told of incredibly tough times.
Applegate’s parents separated when she was five months old, and her mother spiraled into heroin addiction, fueled by a series of abusive partners.
When Applegate herself was five years old, a female babysitter sexually abused her, forcing Applegate to give her oral sex.
By middle school, Applegate was the family’s main breadwinner. As a young adult, she spent five years with an unnamed abusive boyfriend.
But for years, despite the turbulence, she triumphed – landing the role of Kelly Bundy in the hit Fox sitcom Married… With Children and playing the feisty teenager for 11 seasons.
Applegate scored an Emmy for her guest appearance on Friends as the sister of Jennifer Aniston’s character, Rachel
Applegate at the Emmy Awards in 2019
Off screen, her social status was as secure as her career: She was friends with Johnny Depp (pictured left) and dated Brad Pitt (pictured right)
In 2008, at the age of 36, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy: doctors found she had the BRCA1 gene mutation which would cause Angelina Jolie in 2013 to undergo the same procedure, as a preventative measure.
Applegate appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show after her surgery and claimed that the cancer was a blessing.
In reality, she admits in her memoir, it hit her incredibly hard and she now regrets the sunny spin she put on her situation.
‘I had lied, thinking I was being uplifting,’ she wrote. ‘I was acting like Little Ms Warrior, but that’s not how I really felt. The truth was, I was alone and sad and mourning something that is the most intimate and devastating of amputations, and no amount of plastic surgery can ever make up for it.’
She soldiered on.
Prior to her cancer diagnosis, in 2004, she was cast as Will Ferrell’s sidekick in the cult classic Anchorman films and he returned to her side 15 years later to produce her popular Netflix show Dead to Me, which ran from 2019-22.
It should have been a career high.
The show, a dark comedy about two women who meet at a grief therapy session, won rave reviews. Applegate was nominated for another Emmy, plus Screen Actors Guild and Critics Choice awards.
But in the midst of her triumph, in 2021, she received the devastating news of her MS diagnosis.
The condition is a degenerative nerve disorder, for which there is no cure. Some people can live a full and relatively normal life with it, while others find it advances and then goes into remission. Others live in constant pain and rapidly decline.
Applegate said in May 2023 that there was ‘never a good day.’
‘You just have little s***** days,’ she told Vanity Fair. ‘People are like, “Well, why don’t you take more showers?” Well, because getting in the shower is frightening. You can fall, you can slip, your legs can buckle. Especially because I have a glass shower. It’s frightening to me to get in there.
‘There are just certain things that people take for granted in their lives that I took for granted. Going down the stairs, carrying things – you can’t do that anymore.
‘It f***ing sucks. I can still drive my car short distances. I can bring up food to my kid. Up, never down.’
Applegate has been supported by her husband of 13 years, punk rocker Martyn LeNoble. The couple are parents to a 15-year-old daughter, Sadie.
From 2001-7 she was married to actor Johnathon Schaech.
In June 2024, sources close to Applegate told the Daily Mail she felt LeNoble would be ‘better off without her’ – but the devoted Dutchman was remaining by her side.
‘[LeNoble] loves her so incredibly much and there is nothing that would make him walk away from her or their family,’ the source said.
Applegate also worried about the impact of her illness on their teenager daughter.
‘She feels like Sadie is having to take care of her when it should be the other way around,’ the source said.
‘Christina is dealing the best she can, and she knows she is a huge role model and inspiration and has so many people who love and support her. It is just hard being the one who is stuck in this position – knowing that it will only get worse.’
That same year, Applegate launched a podcast MeSsy, co-hosted with fellow MS sufferer Jamie-Lynn Sigler.
Sigler, who played Meadow Soprano – daughter of James Gandolfini’s character Tony Soprano – on the hit New Jersey mafia show, was diagnosed with MS at the age of 20, while filming the series.
From 2001-7 she was married to actor Johnathon Schaech
Applegate has been supported by her husband of 13 years, punk rocker Martyn LeNoble
Applegate also worried about the impact of her illness on their teenager daughter, Sadie
Sigler hid her condition for 15 years, only revealing it in 2017.
Now 44, she and Applegate have been determined to make other sufferers feel less alone.
‘I always tell people that I don’t speak in flowers, and I think that’s really important,’ Applegate told Rolling Stone in March. ‘Because of the podcast, we’ve noticed that a lot of people have gone, “Thank you so much for being so raw and weird and f***ed up.” And so that’s kind of what the platform is.
‘Those of us who have MS are never going to be understood. We just want to be heard. Let us complain. Just let me be pissed off about it.’
Right now, our source said, ‘Christina is getting the care she needs, and she and those around her are optimistic.’
Applegate’s representative told the Daily Mail: ‘I have no comment on whether she is in the hospital or what her medical treatments are.
‘She’s had a long history of complicated medical conditions that she has been refreshingly open about, as evidenced in her memoir and on her podcast.’
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