National treasre Joanna Lumley had some words of wisdom at the Cheltenham Literature Festival and opened up about her former fear of death
Dame Joanna Lumley has revealed the secrets of her long-lasting marriage – and why she is no longer scared of dying. The 79-year-old national treasure gave a wide-ranging talk at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.
She insisted she was not scared of dying after several incidents had made her more relaxed about her mortality. The first event was when she filmed BBC documentary Girl Friday in 1994 when she agreed to spend nine days on an uninhabited desert island off the coast of Madagascar with just a basic survival kit.
She said: “I had this piece of sacking, no bed or anything like that. No towels kept dry, and I lived like a little animal. And it was the most thrilling thing. It changed me completely. I stopped being afraid of death. because I suddenly thought everything’s here, these little creatures, when the crew came on in the morning to film me, and then went off in the evening, when the sun set, and when it goes down it’s gone black.
“And so it was black for about 12 hours of the night on my own in a cave or on the beach with nothing to read, nothing to do. So you have your own thoughts with you there.
“And I thought, Look, if this is what it is, I belong to the earth, the small turtles running there, the great big fish eagles who come looking at me, the fruit bats who fly close. I could just belong here, and that would be okay, and I could lie on the ground and be asleep. So I stopped being afraid.
“And another time I stopped being afraid was when Patsy fell into an open grave. We’d been up to somewhere like Highgate Cemetery and they put some crash mats in the bottom.
“But one feels a bit spooky about these things lying in a grave. But I went onto the bottom and lay there, and I saw these lovely earth walls empty, and it felt like home.
“No matter what we think or want or do or say, we can’t stop us being alive and being dead. Everybody here is alive, and so all of us will be dead, so we can’t stop that. So you’ve got to kind of come to terms with it.”
Dame Joanna was promoting her new publication My Book of Treasures, which features lines from her best-loved authors, her pearls of wisdom and nuggets of trivia.
She said: “When I say I have written it, the truth is I have assembled it. It is things in my head, or that people have said, or poems, and things I have collected that I love. It is magic.” She also spoke briefly about her husband, composer Stephen Barlow, and the secret of their long marriage, having walked down the aisle in 1986.
She said: “I think one of the great things about Stevie, he’s a conductor, and he’s a composer, and he’s also a pianist and so we both knew we had different lives when we married, and we both knew that we’d be apart quite off the time.
“And I think that’s probably quite healthy, because I go off on trips and I do stuff and film. He goes off and does operas and things. We don’t need each other in each other’s lives when you’re working. I can’t just sit there while he’s rehearsing an opera. He doesn’t need to come and just hang around the film set when I’m working.
“And so we keep it separate from each other. But I think one of the first things you’ve got to have for whoever you marry, who is going to be your chosen companion, is respect. You’ve got to think the world of them. You’ve got to think they’re the cat’s pyjamas, because if you don’t, it’s got no chance.”
Source: Mirror
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