'He's Aware Sometimes and Then Sometimes Not': Danny Glover's Daughter Reveals Actor's Tragic Alzheimer's Reality

Lethal Weapon star Danny Glover has revealed he is living with Alzheimer's disease, telling viewers in a pre-recorded interview on NBC's Today show on Wednesday that he received the diagnosis in 2023, a year after he was given an honorary Oscar in the United States.

The 79-year-old actor, best known for playing veteran detective Roger Murtaugh opposite Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon films and for his role in The Color Purple, had continued to appear in public and at fan events without speaking about his health. The announcement ends months of quiet speculation around his memory, and places Glover among the growing number of high-profile figures choosing to go public with Alzheimer's.

Alzheimer's disease, a progressive condition that causes the brain to shrink and cells to die, is the most common form of dementia. According to the Alzheimer's Association, it affects more than 5 million people in the US and more than 1 million in the UK, disrupting memory, orientation and behaviour over time and often leading to the need for around-the-clock care.

Danny Glover Faces Alzheimer's 'In A Sense'

Speaking to Today, Glover said he was told he had Alzheimer's 'not long' after collecting his honorary Academy Award in 2022, an honour that recognised both his screen work and his long record of political and humanitarian activism.

'I can live with it in a sense,' he said, describing the early stages of the disease. 'I'm sure as it advances, different things will be different and changing.'

He admitted he is still struggling to fully absorb what the diagnosis means. In a separate conversation with People, Glover said he was 'still not accepting in my mind all parts of it,' describing a kind of uneasy truce with his own memory.

'There are the moments that you keep remembering that validate the fact that you can remember stuff,' he said. 'And there are moments I'll never forget.'

That tension, between the memories that remain sharp and the ones that slip away, is the everyday reality of Alzheimer's. Early symptoms typically include short-term memory loss, confusion and sudden mood changes. As the disease progresses, people can lose the ability to recognise family members, to move around safely and, eventually, even to walk and eat without help.

Medical guidance from the Alzheimer's Association notes that on average patients live five to seven years after diagnosis, though some live 10 to 15 years, underscoring how long families can inhabit this in-between state where someone is themselves and not themselves at once.

'He's Aware Sometimes And Then Sometimes Not'

Glover's daughter, producer and entrepreneur Mandisa Glover, sat alongside her father during the Today segment and has been refreshingly blunt about what they are facing.

In the pre-taped interview she said it was 'really important' that the decision to go public about his Alzheimer's belonged to him.

'And the time is now,' she said. 'What better time but now for him to speak for himself? It's important because people ask questions sometimes, and I don't want to be a dishonest person and say, 'Oh, yeah, everything is all right. It's all great.''

Speaking to People, Mandisa put it even more plainly, explaining that 'he's aware sometimes and then sometimes not.' It is a line that will land hard with anyone who has watched a parent drift in and out of the room in that particular way dementia creates.

Her first hint that something was wrong, she said, was when her father began to stumble over the stories he had told all his life.

'The history of my dad is that he remembers every single thing back to 1970, what corner he was standing on, who he spoke to, what they spoke about, what colour they were wearing, everything,' she recalled.

'He'd tell you so much about his parents, and I've heard those stories over and over, and there would be pieces of the story missing. I said, 'I wonder what's going on.''

Alzheimer's specialists often describe that loss of autobiographical detail, particularly for someone with a once-photographic recall, as one of the subtle early warning signs families notice long before a formal diagnosis.

A Career That Rewrote The Rules

For starters, Glover is not just another Hollywood veteran receiving bad news in his late seventies. He is one of the few Black actors of his generation to become a global box office lead and, in the Lethal Weapon franchise, he helped redraw what an ageing action hero could look and sound like.

The original Lethal Weapon, written by Predator actor Shane Black and directed by Richard Donner, was released in 1987 and drew critical praise for its blend of action and character drama. Glover and Gibson played mismatched Los Angeles detectives Roger Murtaugh and Martin Riggs, their chalk-and-cheese partnership driving four films across more than a decade.

The first film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound, losing out to The Last Emperor. A sequel followed in 1989, adding Joe Pesci to the cast, with a third instalment in 1992 that went on to become the highest-grossing entry in the series. A fourth film arrived in 1998, introducing Jet Li as the villain and cementing the franchise as a staple of late-20th-century action cinema.

Outside the cop movies, Glover's work in Steven Spielberg's 1985 adaptation of The Color Purple remains one of his most discussed performances, and he has continued to appear on stage and screen while campaigning around labour rights, HIV/Aids and racial injustice. Even in 2025 he was reuniting with Gibson at fan expos, gamely revisiting the old roles for queues of nostalgic fans.

Which is why the Alzheimer's diagnosis hits differently. This is a man known for remembering everything, suddenly having to admit that he cannot trust his own mind.

Talking About Alzheimer's On His Own Terms

Glover said coming to terms with his 2023 diagnosis has meant 'in some sense acknowledging that it's happening to you and at the same time that there are millions of people suffering from it.'

That awareness, that he is part of a much larger community of people with Alzheimer's, seems to be driving the family's decision to speak so openly. They are far from the first famous household to go public, but there is something unvarnished in Mandisa's choice of words and her refusal to pretend that everything is fine.

For millions of families, this is familiar stuff. The forgotten appointment. The repeated story. The way a parent loses a thread midway through a sentence they have spoken for 40 years. Most of it never makes it onto television.

Glover, typically, has decided to use the platform he has left to say the quiet part out loud. How long he will be able to keep doing that is, unavoidably, another question.