It is believed that Dee Dee was suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disorder in which a caregiver (usually a parent) applies an imaginary illness or injury to a person under his or her care. She knew enough medical terminology to convince people she was well-informed regarding Gypsy's ailments. It also helped that Dee Dee had once worked as a nurse's aide. Dee Dee would often switch doctors to create a confusing medical trail. She claimed that Gypsy had epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, leukemia, cancer, asthma, eye problems, hearing problems, and chromosomal defects, among other things, none of which were true (aside from an occasional lazy eye).

As she grew, Dee Dee's list of her daughter's medical issues seemed to never end. According to the BuzzFeed article on which The Act was based, Dee Dee began obsessing over Gypsy's fake medical problems when Gypsy was only three months old, claiming that she had sleep apnea. Philĭid Dee Dee really claim that Gypsy had that many ailments? 'My mother told the doctors that I couldn't eat,' says Gypsy, 'so they put a permanent feeding tube in.' -Dr. In conducting The Act fact check, we confirmed that Gypsy did have a feeding tube. Speech experts have weighed in on why her voice was so high pitched, with some reasoning that she was doing it almost unconsciously in response to being infantilized by her mother, Dee Dee, who had convinced her that she was years younger than she was. You can hear her squeaky voice in this interview from 2008 when she was almost 17. The Act true story reveals that Gypsy Rose Blanchard's voice was indeed that high pitched, especially while she was under her mother's care. 'I'm very happy that I was able to do her voice and become her more completely.'

'It's just doing your research - watching videos, listening to her speak, and just really trying to get it in my brain as much as possible,' the actress told Vulture in March 2019, adding that at first the studio assumed she would use her own voice instead of trying to match Gypsy's.

Mistakenly, many viewers have assumed that it's Joey King's real voice, but it isn't. Is Gypsy Rose Blanchard's voice really that high pitched?Īctress Joey King, who portrays Gypsy, studied her unique voice and says that it was a crucial part of getting into character for the role.

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