Rita Wilson is 69 years old and spent four decades being the woman audiences wanted to see fall in love on screen. We first saw her in Sleepless in Seattle, in 1993, and in Runaway Bride, in 1999. Behind the camera, she built something even bigger: she produced My Big Fat Greek Wedding in 2002 and Mamma Mia! in 2008, two films that became part of popular culture.
In March 2019, she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That same year, Greece granted her honorary citizenship for her help to the victims of the Mati fire, one of the most devastating in the country’s recent history.
But there is one chapter Wilson did not act out: she lived it. In a recent interview with The Guardian, she spoke about her illness, a cancer she faced far from the spotlight and now describes in a way no one would have anticipated from the star of so many happy comedies.
She called it a gift. She said it gave her an extra life.
Married to Tom Hanks since 1988, Wilson has spent years as honorary co-chair of the Women’s Cancer Research Fund, raising money to research cancers that affect women. She does not do it from the distance of someone else’s cause. She does it from within the body that faced it and won.
There are defeats that humiliate, and there are defeats that, when recounted afterward, suspiciously resemble a victory. Rita Wilson’s is one of the latter.