4. Kathryn Joosten
Known for her roles on The West Wing and Desperate Housewives, two-time Primetime Emmy Award winner Kathryn Joosten began smoking at 16 and quit when diagnosed with lung cancer in 2001. Then, two years after announcing she was in remission in 2007 on The View, doctors found another tumor on her other lung. “I’m not the type of personality to take this lying down, and I’m not accepting it,” she told E! Online at the time. Joosten wanted to alter the perceptions that people with lung cancer did it to themselves. She says that stigma combined with denial that it kills as many as 450 people every day “creates an environment in which no diagnostics or treatments can be developed.” Despite surgery a month later in October to remove the growth, Joosten passed away on June 2, 2012. She was 72.