United Kingdom, June 5 -- Rebel Wilson's doctors feared malaria had "demented [her] brain" when she declared she wanted to be an actress.

The 45-year-old star contracted the disease after being bitten "100 times" while travelling in Mozambique, South East Africa, when she was 18 years old, and a vivid hallucination she experienced in hospital caused her to want to forge a new career path away from her planned field of law.

She told The Guardian newspaper: "When I got to Mozambique, I got malaria really badly. We didn't have time to put up the mosquito nets and I woke up with my face covered in mosquito bites.

"Two weeks later, I was in hospital because it was a really bad strain. I don't know whether it was the disease or the drugs, bu...