A Second Miracle: Bijou Phillips Fights for Her Life as Kidney Fails, Urgent Search for Donor Begins

She has spent more than four decades defying the odds. As an infant, she fought for breath in a NICU incubator. As a young woman, she navigated Hollywood's bright lights under the shadow of a famous surname. In 2017, a friend's selfless gift gave her a second chance at life.

Now, Bijou Phillips is back in the hospital. And she is running out of time.

The 45-year-old actress and socialite is currently under care at UCLA Health, her representative confirmed this week, where she has been placed back on dialysis. The transplanted kidney she received eight years ago—a lifeline from a close friend—has failed. The search for a new living donor is no longer a hope. It is a race.

A Lifetime at War with Her Own Body

To understand where Bijou is now, you have to understand where she started.

She was born with underdeveloped kidneys. Her first three months of life were not spent in a nursery or her mother's arms, but in a neonatal intensive care unit, tethered to a dialysis machine. Before she had a name, she had a diagnosis. Before she could walk, she was fighting.

Most people with such a severe congenital condition would have been defined by it. Bijou, instead, became a wild child of the late '90s—a downtown New York fixture, a model, an actress, a member of the infamous Phillips-Manson clan. She partied. She performed. She married actor Danny Masterson in 2011 and welcomed a daughter, Fianna, in 2014.

But the body never forgets.

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The Gift That Couldn't Last

In 2017, when her first transplanted kidney began to falter, a friend stepped forward. That anonymous donor gave Bijou something no medicine could manufacture: time. Eight years of it.

But transplant medicine is not a fairy tale. Even when the surgery succeeds, the war continues.

Her team now confirms that Bijou has suffered "many complications" since that procedure. Chief among them: the BK virus—a common polyomavirus that lives dormant in most humans but awakens with terrifying aggression in immunosuppressed transplant patients. It attacked the new kidney. Cellular rejection followed. Antibody rejection followed that.

The kidney, once pink and healthy, slowly became a foreign object her own body refused to recognize.

"Time Is of the Essence"

Today, Bijou is back where she started: on dialysis, waiting.

Her representative is measured but urgent. "She is in stable condition," the statement reads, "but time is of the essence."

She is under the care of Dr. Anjay Rastogi at the CORE Kidney program at UCLA—one of the nation's leading centers for complex nephrology. The message is clear: the expertise is there. The infrastructure is there. What is missing is the organ.

The Weight of a Famous Name

Bijou Phillips has never been just Bijou. She is the daughter of John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas. She is the half-sister of Mackenzie Phillips. She is the former stepdaughter of Michelle Phillips. For decades, her name has carried the weight of Laurel Canyon mythology and tabloid fascination.

But illness is the great equalizer. It does not care about album sales or ancestry. It does not recognize famous last names.

Right now, Bijou is not a Phillips. She is a patient, one of 90,000 Americans currently waiting for a kidney transplant. Every day, 13 people on that list die.

The Strange Brutality of Kidney Disease

There is a cruel irony in kidney failure that sets it apart from other life-threatening conditions. The patient looks… fine.

Bijou, we are told, is stable. She is awake. She is speaking. Her face, familiar from *Almost Famous* and *Hostel: Part II*, still carries that elfin quality, those wide-set eyes that made her a teenage muse.

But inside, the filtration system is failing. Toxins are building. The body is slowly poisoning itself. Dialysis keeps her alive, but it is a holding pattern—a mechanical substitute for the organic miracle she needs.

What Comes Next

The Phillips family has not yet launched a public donor campaign. There is no website, no Instagram plea, no hashtag. For now, the search remains private, confined to her inner circle and the living donor networks at UCLA.

But the calculus of kidney transplantation is unforgiving. A deceased donor can wait five years or more. A living donor—someone willing to undergo surgery to give a stranger or loved one a kidney—can change everything in a matter of weeks.

Bijou already received one such miracle. She is hoping, against the statistical odds, for another.

The Girl Who Lived

There is a photograph of Bijou Phillips from 1999. She is 19, sprawled across a velvet couch at the Limelight, hair backcombed to heaven, cigarette dangling, laughing at something just out of frame. She looks invincible. She looks like she will live forever.

Twenty-seven years later, she is in a hospital bed, waiting for a phone call.

But if anyone understands second acts, it is her. She survived infancy when the machines were the only thing keeping her alive. She survived the tabloids. She survived the chaos of her youth and the scrutiny of her marriage and the collapse of a kidney that was supposed to save her.

She has been dying her whole life. She has also been living.

The call will come. It has to. Because Bijou Phillips has never been good at staying down. And the girl who spent her first three months fighting for breath isn't about to stop now.