Diahann Carroll
The TV trailblazer, who broke racial barriers both as the title character of the 1960s TV series Julia and as the deliciously devious Dominique Deveraux on the 1980s soap Dynasty, was diagnosed in the early 1990s and at first chose to tell no one—not even her mother or daughter. She didn’t want people’s first thought about to her to be “She has cancer, you know,” she told OWN network. But then she thought, “That’s pretty arrogant. There are millions of women who have to deal with this every day. We have to work together here, and it’s my responsibility to help them with that.” Now 82, Carroll has since become a cancer activist.
