The actress and presenter has been on our screens for over five decades and is set to star in the second series of the Netflix hit, Wednesday
Dame Joanna Lumley shared a poignant reflection as she turned 79, confessing that she feels her time may be running short. The beloved actress, whose career spans over 50 years, including roles as a Bond girl in the ’60s, a ’70s spy in The New Avengers, and the unforgettable Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous, is also set to appear in the eagerly awaited second season of Netflix’s hit show Wednesday.
Celebrating her 79th birthday on May 1, the esteemed star opened up about facing her own mortality during a chat with Vernon Kay on BBC Radio 2. “As you nearly the top of the hill, you suddenly think, ‘Gosh, there’s not all that much time left,'” she expressed.
“My time must be coming quite soon, and I don’t want to have wasted a minute of being on this beautiful planet. I used to panic when I was young, but as I’ve got older, I’ve started to live day to day. With age, you work out what matters. I always knew that good stuff would come along when I was older.”
Lumley continued to share her wisdom on ageing : “When I was 18, I longed to be 30. When I was 30, I longed to be 50. We mustn’t be led into thinking getting old is bad. Growing old is good.”
In her conversation with Vernon, Dame Joanna also touched upon her personal health battles, particularly living with prosopagnosia, a condition that impairs the ability to recognize familiar faces, even those of close friends and family. She humorously remarked that her solution is to ‘kiss everybody’ since she can’t always discern who they are.
She confessed to a peculiar condition last week, saying: “I’ve got this weird thing with faces, I’ve got face blindness. It’s called Prosopagnosia.”
She explained her coping mechanism: “I have to know who people are, I have to know in advance. I always say ‘please tell me who’s going to be there’ then I can match the name to the thing. It’s not about meeting many people, it’s completely different. It’s followed me and I never knew what it was. I’d try a test. I’d look at somebody and then I would shut my eyes and see if I could see their face in my head. And I couldn’t.”
Joanna has previously admitted to being a smoker, puffing away on anything from one to 40 cigarettes a day. She humorously claimed that smoking has contributed to her fitness, stating: “I am unbelievably fit,” and “Despite, or probably because of smoking, I am never ill. I have these extraordinary procedures.”
After harbouring dreams of acting as a teenager, Joanna faced rejection from drama school before becoming a model in London during the Swinging Sixties. She later dabbled in minor acting roles before landing a part in the 1969 James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
However, it wasn’t until she bagged the role of Purdey in The New Avengers that she truly hit the big time.
And Joanna isn’t planning on hanging up her acting boots anytime soon. Speaking at the SANDS International Film Festival recently, she assured fans that ‘she’ll be there’ as long as she can speak.
“When I told my school that I wanted to go into acting, they said the only roles available for me in film would be as a continuity or makeup girl,” she added. “In the past, women like me would have been sidelined at 38, but now there are leading roles for people in their 50s and significant parts for those in their 70s.”
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