Posts Tagged ‘Personal’
Sarah Hyland is young, beautiful and on a hit TV show – but the Modern Family actress has been quietly battling a serious illness.
Hyland, 21, has had a lifelong battle with kidney dysplasia and underwent a kidney transplant on April 13, 2012, she reveals in the new issue of Seventeen, on newsstands May 22.
The actress, who got the kidney from her father and gave the interview while recovering from surgery, says the whole experience taught her who she can really lean on in times of need.
”You know that family is always going to be there for you – no matter what. My dad gave me a freakin’ kidney!” she tells the magazine. “But it’s also the families that you create outside of your family. And you really find out what kind of people you’re friends with.”
Continues the actress: “It was just amazing, and it really opened my eyes to see who’s there for me and who’s not.”
One person who proved he’s there for her is Hyland’s boyfriend, actor Matt Prokop.
“He helps me with my medication and takes me to doctor appointments and all the stuff that I need to do to take care of myself,” Hyland says. “Any other 21-year-old guy would not be there, I guarantee it. I am one of the luckiest people in the world to have him be there for me.”
As for what she’s thankful for, Hyland says, “I have a second chance at life – not a lot of people get that.”
Haley Dunphy, the big sister on “Modern Family,” appears carefree, spending hours on her cell phone and giving her parents a rough time on the show like any other teenager.
But Sarah Hyland, the 21-year-old actress who plays Haley on the show, has had anything but a carefree life. Hyland’s been struggling with kidney disease since childhood, when she was diagnosed with abnormal kidney development at the age of nine.
“I would be in a lot of pain a lot of the time. If I didn’t get, like, 12 hours of sleep, It felt, like — It felt, like, none at all,” said the Manhattan-born actress.
A secret to the millions of “Modern Family” fans, Hyland would often sit down or text on her phone during a scene to hide her exhaustion.
“You know, if you’re sick, you still go to work. And in between takes, you sit down, or you lay your head down or something,” she said.
As the pain got worse, the actress began looking for an organ donor to avoid spending her life on dialysis. Luckily her father, actor Edward James Hyland, was a perfect match.
Last month, she underwent the transplant surgery and will recover this summer while the show takes a break from filming.
Actress Julie Bowen, who plays Claire Dunphy on the show, has been stopping by to help her clean. Her real-life and on-screen boyfriend, Matt Prokop, has been helping her recover as well.
Hyland offers hope and advice for those struggling with kidney disease: “Know that you’re not alone. Even though it may seem like it a lot of the time. And that if you ask, ‘Why me?’ Well, why not you? You know? It makes you the person that you are today.”
Hyland is a youth ambassador for the Lopez Foundation, where she helps to promote community awareness for organ and kidney donation.
dele can count Modern Family star Sarah Hyland as a fan.
The 20-year-old actress not only loves the British singer’s powerhouse voice, but she credits her hit song “Someone Like You” for saving her life…
It all happened last week when Hyland’s boyfriend lost control of their car they were driving in on an L.A. freeway during a rainstorm.
“It was so foggy you couldn’t see ten feet ahead of you,” she told us at the American Music Awards nominations announcement in Los Angeles. “He had an audition and we were going through lines. He would have been focusing on remembering his lines [but] ‘Someone Like You’ came on the radio, so we blasted it to sing along to it. And then we hit a water pocket…The wheels turned to the right and locked and then it spun.”
Despite spinning multiple times, there was no damage to the car and Hyland and her beau were uninjured. “We were just really shaken up,” she says, adding, “It’s like, ‘Thank you for saving my life!’ ”
We’ll assume Hyland won’t be mocking Adele on Fashion Police anytime soon.
Today, November 24th, is Sarah Hyland’s 20th birthday! On behalf of her fans from around the world, Sarah Hyland Fan would love to wish Sarah an amazing day today!
Modern Family star Sarah Hyland used to be a dog person trapped in a cat person’s body. “I grew up in New York City, and my mom said it wasn’t fair to have a dog in an apartment,” she tells PEOPLEPets.com. “So we had cats, but I always wanted a dog.”
Fast-forward several years, and the 19-year-old actress is the proud owner of Barkley Bixby, a 9-month-old maltipoo. “My boyfriend [High School Musical's Matt Proko] and I were talking about getting a dog, and he told me we should hold off until we get a bigger place,” she explains. “Then, he just surprised me one day. He told me he was picking up some friends at the airport, and instead he picked up Barkley.”
Describing her pooch as “amazing,” Hyland says she’s trained the dog herself, and loves letting him run around her spacious backyard. “It sucks when I have long hours and can’t see him all day, but between my boyfriend and I, it works out,” she says. “For now, we’re happy with one dog, but I think Barkley needs a playmate soon so he has someone to keep him company.”
Perhaps a career would keep him busy? While Hyland doesn’t want him to get into acting — “I don’t want him to be the world’s dog, I just want him to be mine,” she says, laughing — she thinks modeling could be in his future. “Every time we take a picture of him he looks right into the lens,” she says. “He’d be a great dog model.”
Though Barkley is pretty adorable, it’s his moniker that’s most interesting. “Barkley Bixby comes from Modern Family,” Hyland explains. Barkley is the name of a dog butler figurine belonging to Ed O’Neill’s family on the show, while Bixby was the fictional last name given to Ty Burrell’s character on last year’s Valentine’s Day episode. “Matt came up with Barkley, I came up with Bixby,” she says.
So does a dog named for the hit show get to visit the set? Not quite yet. “I wouldn’t want to leave him alone in my trailer,” she says. “I don’t want him to start barking or chewing stuff up. We’ll wait until he’s older.”
For now, Hyland just has to hope her TV family, the Dunphys, add a dog to their brood instead. “I really wish that’d happen,” she says. “I love dogs, and it’d be so much fun to have one on set!’
Modern Family’s Sarah Hyland has spent her summer break visiting family, housebreaking a puppy and getting to move in with her boyfriend, High School Musical 3’s Matt Prokop.
The 19-year-old actress, who plays the ditzy oldest daughter of the Dunphy family, picked up and left her hometown of New York to move to Los Angeles last year, then booked the Modern Family gig just over a month later. While taking time off from shooting the sitcom after its first season, Sarah told Crushable she’s visited NYC and Texas, where she met her boyfriend’s family. Matt and Sarah met two years ago at a HSM3 screen test. They stayed in touch and a few months after Sarah moved to L.A. she decided to give it a go. Now the two are inseparable, appearing together on the red carpets of movies like The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and traveling to Hawaii together in March before Modern Family filmed an episode there. Matt even recently bought Sarah a maltipoo, who they’ve named Barkley Bixby, a loving tribute to her hit TV show.
“My boyfriend actually surprised me with him,” Sarah told us. “He said that we should wait until we get a bigger space to get the dog, and so I was like, ‘Okay fine.’ And then he said, ‘But if we did get one, what would we name him?’ And he [suggested] Barkley…There’s an episode where Jay, Ed O’Neill’s character has a dog butler and the dog butler’s name is Barkley. So we named him Barkley…In the Valentine’s Day episode, when my parents role play, Ty Burrell, who plays my father, he comes up with a character named Clive Bixby. So we took his role playing character’s last name and the dog butler’s first name for a perfect name.”
Sarah said she and Matt are planning to move in together — with Barkley — on August 10, although a friend might also be moving in with the couple, “So it’s not like, ‘Oh god, we’re going to be living together,’” Sarah told us.
They’ll be moving in together right around the time Modern Family goes back into production, although Sarah confesses she has no idea what the expect from the award-winning show’s second season. “I have absolutely no idea what is happening next year. At all,” she told Crushable, adding. “I think it would be really funny if Haley thought she could sing but was completely tone deaf. I keep coming up with random stuff when people ask me what’s going to happen next year. So I’m like, ‘I don’t know, that would be cool.’”
During her time on Modern Family, Sarah managed to squeeze in some movie shoots, including Mother’s Little Helpers, a movie in which she plays the girlfriend of a guy who starts an escort service for neighborhood moms in order to pay his private school tuition. Sarah also filmed a movie with her boyfriend Matt, Conception. “It’s kind of like an R rated version of Valentine’s Day,” Sarah told us. “There are 8 different couples who all have different situations and all end up pregnant. My boyfriend and I play a couple in it, and we play sophomores in high school and they lose their virginity to each other and they think they’re using a condom but it’s a really old condom. So everyone gets pregnant at the end of the movie.”
But, Sarah also told us she’s already played her dream role, on Law & Order. “I played a crazy psycho girl who murdered her roommate,” she explained. “That was a lot of fun to do. That was pretty much my dream role and I got to do it.”
From Crushable
