15 Famous people who went from rags to riches and back to rags again!

Famous people who went from rags – Popular headlines around the entertainment blogosphere these days suggest: There’s only one thing people like more than a rags-to-riches story and that’s a story about someone losing their riches. We like to celebrate triumph over hardship, but we also really enjoy when the playing field is evened out the other way and rich and famous people defy the odds to lose it all.

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Whether it’s jealousy or some misplaced sense of justice, people love it when celebrities mismanage their money. Today’s article combines the best of both worlds with stories about people rising to stardom and riches and then losing it all.

Not every rags-to-riches-to-rags story made the cut for this list. For example, Wesley Snipes, songstressToni Braxton, and comedian Chris Tucker, just to name a few, but their stories are mostly about tax evasion, or drug addiction, and greedy managers, pandering producers, or just friends and/or accountants who gave horrible advice, the usual stuff. The following is a list of people whose stories are a bit more out of the ordinary; entertainers and athletes, politicians and producers who were iconic in their times, whose rise to wealth from rags to riches defied steep odds, or whose fall back to rags was particularly unexpected, weird, tragic, or otherwise noteworthy.

Here are 15 iconic human beings who climbed their way against all odds to the top of the mountain only to tumble right back down. Here are 15 famous people who went from rags to riches and back again

15. Gary Coleman

Gary Wayne Coleman was adopted at birth by a nurse practitioner mother and fork-lift operator father and at the height of his success, was earning $100,000 an episode, in 1980s money, for playing an adopted son on the hit sitcom, Diff’rent Strokes.

Over the course of 8 years/seasons, Coleman became a TV superstar and both the actor and his character, Arnold, became known across the U.S. just as much for his catchphrase as for being short and having childlike facial features into adulthood. Most fans were unaware, until his 2010 death, that the actor’s physical traits were the side effect of lifelong treatment of autoimmune kidney disease. Due to these medical expenses, plus shady accountants, a lawsuit against his adoptive parents, and his own irresponsible spending, Gary Coleman struggled financially after his popularity faded and in 1999 filed for bankruptcy.