She’s not out for blood in real life.
As the deliciously wicked Victoria Grayson on ABC’s “Revenge,” Madeleine Stowe is always scheming, moving the people in her life like chess pieces in order to get her way.
But off-screen, the actress is used to putting others first — most notably her father Robert, who suffered from multiple sclerosis. Stowe kept her father’s diagnosis private for years — and the fact that she was his caretaker.
“I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable,” she told the Daily News. “It was very, very dark and when you’re dealing with entertainment, people don’t really want to know the dark side.”
MS, which affects 400,000 people in the U.S., happens when certain cells in the body attack the central nervous system, including the brain and the spinal cord. Over time, this can lead to scar tissue, which can hinder nerve impulses and thus limit mobility.
The autoimmune disease manifests in different ways, but some common symptoms include numbness or tingling, walking difficulties, vision problems and memory changes.
Stowe’s father Robert suffered terribly with MS, confined to a wheelchair for years and plagued with vicious seizures. There were no treatments available when he was ill, which meant he lost control of his faculties quickly. He died 20 years after diagnosis, as his doctors expected him to.
But today’s 11 FDA-approved treatments encouraged Stowe to offer her story as a way of motivating others to take action.
“Had (my father) lived now I think that there was a very good chance that his disease could have been slowed down,” she said. “I could have had a father and he could have had a real life.”
Through the Lights, Camera, Take Action campaign with drug manufacturer Genzyme, Stowe is a spokesperson for Aubagio, the company’s once-a-day FDA-approved MS pill that is thought to work by stopping overactive immune cells in the blood from replicating, which results in less of the disease reaching the brain and thus fewer relapses for patients.
It works better than injectable therapies, according to Dr. Ann Bass, a neurologist with the Neurology Center of San Antonio, Tex., and Genzyme consultant.
“Injectable therapies have a broader mechanism where they do several things but not necessarily very strongly,” she told the Daily News. “Think of Aubagio as having one mechanism, but it does it very well.”
Both Stowe and Bass agree that the most important things a patient with MS can do are accept the diagnosis and work with a physician to find the most appropriate treatment. Because MS manifests in different ways, all different types of medication should be discussed with one’s doctor. But Bass likes that Aubagio is good for patients who are newly diagnosed or not responding well to other treatments.
And Bass is hopeful that there will be an all-out cure for the illness “maybe in children’s generation or our grandchildren’s generation.”
“Here we are in 2014 and we have 11 amazing FDA-approved therapies since 1993,” she said. “Prior to that we had absolutely none, so even within the last two decades we have seen such amazing advances.”