Annette Funicello was America's sweetheart from her early days as one of the original Mouseketeers in the 1950s, her series of beach movies in the 1960s, and her Skippy commercials as a Mom in the 1970s. She was just as real and genuine in real life as she appeared on screen. You never heard a bad word about her and she was loved and admired by all her knew her. In the 1980s she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and In 1993, she opened The Annette Funicello Research Fund for Neurological Diseases as a non-profit foundation with a specific interest in supporting clinical studies that seek to expose the underlying cause of Multiple Sclerosis and therapies that show promise of reversing the symptoms of this and other neurological diseases.