Chapter Eight
Dying and Coming Back
Near Death
I was playing Aquilina opposite Ian McKellen’s Pierre in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d at the National Theatre in 1984. I’d come off stage and was removing my make-up because I had to get to the hospital. I’d promised I’d be there before 11 o’clock and had arranged to have a drink with the rest of the cast before going because we had a ten-day break from the show. I was rushing.
Suddenly, I was hit by a terrible premonition. A feeling of imminent catastrophe washed over me and the thought gripped me; ‘Oh no, this is going to go really, really wrong.’
The play’s director, Peter Gill, was already in the Green Room.
‘I’m really not feeling good about this,’ I told him.
‘Well of course you’re not,’ he replied. ‘You’re going to hospital to have an operation.’
‘I think it’s more than that,’ I said.
‘Ahhh, you’ll be fine,’ he tried to convince me.
Ian came in. ‘I’m not feeling good about this,’ I told him.
‘You’ll be fine, my dear.’ He does that reassuring thing very naturally.
Well, whatever. ‘Bye folks, see you in ten days’ time.’
I put it out of my mind and got to the Royal Free. The nurse was cross. It was nearly 11 o’clock, I’d just come off stage and now I had to get into bed and pretend to be ill. I wasn’t ill. I was just there for a necessary operation.
Everyone else on the ward was asleep. I think I managed to have a shower. The nurse showed me a mangy little bed in the corner. ‘Everyone’s going to bump into it as they walk by,’ I thought. It had a flimsy curtain round it. ‘Not nice digs.’
I was on the main ward: low rank, no privileges. No problem. I wasn’t staying there long. I had ten days to have the operation and recover, then back to work.
The morning after surgery I painted my toenails, replaced my jewellery and started working on designs for our new house. By day three my temperature was spiking to 104 degrees and I was feeling very poorly. I was moved to a private room with en suite loo, an emergency button and a wonderful view of the whole of Hampstead Heath – special privileges. I was moving fast up the ranks. The problem was I was very ill.
The situation quickly unravelled. Having vomited green bile in a dramatic splash against the wall opposite the window, I turned to look at the clouds but I couldn’t hold focus. I was fading, becoming part of the clouds. I was floating. No longer in pain, I was looking down on my body lying in a messy bed. I was floating on the ceiling of a white hospital room observing slippers on the floor, books piled on the side locker and myself, lying blank-faced on the bed in a white nightdress.
There was a jump-cut to another scene. I don’t know how it happened – it just did. I was being led down a wide, rough path towards a boulder; behind it was the most beautiful, warm and inviting golden light. I was being led by four Franciscan monks. I think that’s what they were. They were to my left, wearing very coarse, brown, woven habits with hoods, as in images of St Francis of Assisi. Their hoods were up so I couldn’t see their faces. Their habits were tied with thick rope belts and they wore sandals. Not of our time but also not frightening – not at all. Not even strange. The scene was welcoming. I knew the light was God and that the boulder was the stone of Jesus’ tomb. I was aware that I was leaving and arriving; that I was going away from the pain and coming home. Suddenly two enormous eyes, like those of a huge owl, swooped in and filled my entire field of vision. I recognized them as my daughter Chloe’s eyes, and they were saying, ‘Oh, no, you don’t!’
Chloe’s eyes
Then, like a film going backwards, everything rewound and I found myself back in the hospital bed. I managed to press the emergency button, which remarkably was still in my hand, and set off the red lights and bells. A doctor rushed in and started fussing around. I said to her, ‘I think I just died.’
Without missing a beat she replied, ‘Yes, I think you probably did.’
I was rushed into theatre for emergency surgery. They couldn’t get hold of anyone in my family to sign me off, but Steph Cole came up and signed. Pretty ironic, really – in Tenko her character had suffocated mine with a pillow as a mercy killing at my character’s request.
It was late on a Saturday night and a surgeon had to come from St Thomas’ Hospital. He looked so dapper in his bow tie I made him breathe over me so I could check if he’d been drinking. Having come back, I didn’t want to be killed off a second time.
I came round after the operation to a hazy consciousness, bandaged like a mummy and with tubes everywhere. I drifted for days; fed through a drip and filled with 12 different antibiotics to kill the infection that had nearly killed me.
I was down to 90lb but, until my gut worked again, I was not allowed to eat anything. I had cheated one night with the pith of a cherry, and regretted it for hours afterwards – the pain was terrible. The next day they were going to operate and fit a colostomy bag. It would be permanent. They tried to reassure me that I’d be able to live with it but the thought was horrific.
Dear Ronnie Roberts saved me. She took over my room with her girlfriend Leigh and Martyn Stanbridge, my young companion at that time.
‘This is what we’re going to do, sweet girl,’ she told me. ‘We’re going to say a prayer and I’m just going to work on your tummy and I promise I won’t hurt you.’ Ronnie got me to imagine a tiny paralysed kitten, a little wounded creature, inside my belly. She had Leigh on one of my feet and Martyn on the other, gently manipulating the acupressure points that stimulate the intestines. Barely touching me she worked her healing magic, drawing light circles with the gentlest of touch on my stomach. During that night I passed wind. Everything had joined up again and I didn’t have to have a colostomy.
Aiding my recovery. Left to right: Martyn, Leigh and Ronnie
Ronnie is so spiritual and also so practical. Isn’t that the way it’s meant to be? The practical and the spiritual are not mutually exclusive. You can turn washing-up into a spiritual task. You can fold the clothes, definitely bathe a baby and you can help a friend, with practical spirituality.
John came to visit me when I was still very poorly. I was also a filthy mess. He asked me if I needed anything.
‘Yes! I need a bath. I need to wash my hair. Look, it’s got bile in it. The most the nurse will do is pat me with a wet flannel.’
He gathered my wraith-like body in his arms and carried me to the bathroom, somehow wheeling the drip stand I was connected to alongside us. He stripped me bare, covering the bandages wrapped around my stomach with a nurse’s apron, and proceeded to wash my hair and bathe me in the shower. I was like a limp rag doll in his hands. He washed me gently, until I was clean. There was only one person I knew who would have done such a mad thing. That was John.
Connie
My agent Maureen came to see me with a thick stack of scripts. ‘This is what we’ve been waiting for’ she said, and plonked them on the bed.
‘Oh, Maureen that’s too heavy, I can’t take any weight on the sheet.’
She put them on the side table.
‘Read through them when you can,’ she said on her way out.
I couldn’t show any interest. Work seemed a long way away. I was weak and felt barely alive. Later, I needed a tissue. Maureen had put the scripts on top of my box of tissues. To get to the box I had to move the pile, and I only had the strength to lift one script at a time. I lifted the first one and it was so much effort I thought, ‘Now I’ve got it in my hand I might as well read it.’ Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. I read the whole night. I read through the entire series of 13 episodes. It was brilliant, it was mine, and I had to do it.
The script was for a television series called Connie. It was about a woman returning to the UK to take back control of her family’s ailing business after living in Greece. Connie was a grafter. She was a survivor. She was a trickster. I liked her immediately. I knew her character could mend me. I knew I could use her to obliterate the sadness from my life once and for all. By entering the world of this formidable and courageous woman I could bring about my own recovery.
The trouble was I had to get the part. I phoned Alan Dosser, the director, and said, ‘She’s mine.’ He asked for a meeting and I lied that I was down at my parents’ house in Somerset, had not been very well and didn’t want to come to London, hoping we could just do it on the phone.
‘That’s fine,’ he said, ‘I’m coming to the West Country next week.’ So I discharged myself from the Royal Free, promising my doctors I would arrange to continue the intravenous antibiotics by daily injections, which turned out to be like being injected with an icing syringe.
A friend arranged a private ambulance and I beat Alan to the West Country by a couple of days.
My mother offered me her complete backing. ‘Darling, I can’t believe how determined you are to recover,’ she told me. ‘Whatever you decide to do, I will support you, totally.’ She couldn’t believe I’d survived. She’d probably been thinking I’d die and she’d have to bring up Phoebe and Chloe.
Martyn and Mummy arranged me in a deck chair outside the beach hut. Once I was sitting, that was it. I couldn’t move. I was so ill. I still wasn’t much more than a wraith, so Mummy put padding in my bra. I couldn’t let Alan see what kind of state I was in. Martyn had to take care of the tea. I told him just to offer and to be aware of everything without making me boss him about. I had it all very carefully stage-managed. Alan was an anarchist, a risk-taker. He’s wickedly good news. He’d been artistic director at the Liverpool Everyman and was used to sailing close to the edge. Still, there was no way I wanted him to know the state I was in.
The meeting was going very well and the conversation was flowing. Then I got rather excited about something Alan was saying. I forgot myself momentarily and thought I’d stretch my legs on the white picket fence in front of me. I lifted one leg and put it on the fence. It took all my energy. I couldn’t lift my other leg to join it, and remained in that ungainly position for the rest of the meeting.
Connie: another life, another chance, another beginning. She was going to bring me back to being, anew.
It was the middle of the second day’s rehearsal. I was still weak.
‘Alan,’ I said, out of everyone else’s earshot. ‘You know, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this.’
‘I understand – that’s OK,’ he replied. Without missing a beat, he continued, ‘Do you want to stop now, or do you want to carry on blocking out the scenes so we’ve got it blocked for anyone who might take over till the end of the day?’
I told him I’d keep going and at the end of the day he said, ‘See you tomorrow.’ It was just a little moment.
Connie was so fabulous. Ron Hutchinson’s concept for Connie had been based around the political question of whether or not it was possible for a single businesswoman to make it in Thatcher’s Britain and maintain her integrity, without ‘old money’ or becoming involved in corruption. It was a very pertinent question and right on the mark at the time but, set in a knitting factory in the Midlands, I was concerned it wouldn’t be glamorous enough to attract a large audience. I thought we might dress it up a bit.
‘What’s the American programme that’s on at the moment?’ I asked Alan. ‘You know the one – Dynasty.’ We glamorized Connie in a way that had never been intended. I was pulling Dynasty, like a set, towards me.
At one point in the series Connie admits herself to hospital. I’d already had the full training. The intravenous acting I was doing for Connie came straight out of the Royal Free. I had hobbling-with-an-IV acting down to a tee.
At the forefront of my mind was one over-arching question: why had I lived, why had I come back?
Once again I was aware that there was so much more to everything than the three dimensions our lives appear to take place in. On a physical level I knew Connie was going to be amazingly difficult – I’d been so ill – but it felt like a blessing, an opportunity I’d been handed on a plate. My agent Maureen’s words, ‘It’s what we’ve been waiting for,’ echoed through my mind.
On the first day of filming we shot a scene where Connie hijacks a car. She arrives at the airport from Greece and has to get into town. She gets into a car with a chauffeur. We were waiting to do the next shot. I was in the back seat, when out of the blue – ‘I’ve got a couple of messages for you,’ the chauffeur said, looking at me in the rear view mirror.
‘Oh?’ I wondered what he was talking about.
‘You’ve been incredibly ill and have had two operations.’
‘Sorry?’ I replied, stunned. I knew that he hadn’t been told anything, because nobody we were working with knew I’d been ill. He turned around to face me.
Seeing the shock on my face, he apologized. ‘I’m sorry… my wife and I run the Psychic Society of Great Britain. A couple of messages came through for you last night.’
‘Oh really?’ I said.
‘One is that you are to drop all hate and all thought of retribution for what happened to you, because it won’t aid you in your mending.’
‘Oh, and by the way,’ the chauffeur continued, ‘you needn’t worry about money because you’re never going to have to want for that. The other message I’ve got for you is that you can mend your scars with spring green and spring yellow. Those are the healing colours you should meditate on.’
How would he know I had scars? There was no way he could have known. Meditating on spring green and spring yellow really did work – my scar is barely visible.
I always get three estimates for any work that needs doing. Just before and during rehearsals I’d gone to see three psychics, separately. I didn’t tell any of them about what had happened. I didn’t mention the fact that I’d been ill. I just went and asked for a reading. Each of them said the same thing – virtually word for word. They told me that I’d been through a major event and that the focus now would be to find my own spiritual truth. They said that during the first half of my life I had lived very physically, and that the second half would be lived spiritually. There were no vitamins to take, no exercises to do. I just took it on board, said ‘thank you,’ and got on with what I was doing.
I had no idea what their readings meant. At the time it didn’t really make sense. I laughed cynically when, not so long after, I got offered work in Hollywood, thinking, ‘Oh yes, not much physicality there.’ Of course, I didn’t know that Southern California is a feast of all spirituality.
From the point I nearly died, the universe opened up for me. God’s divine munificence began to become very apparent. Connie was the first gift. What the chauffeur told me made total sense: drop the hate, drop the story, drop the pain, drop all that stuff and let the gold shine through.
Connie was filmed in Nottingham during the miners’ strike. It was a very harsh time. I always seem to find myself in the right place – witnessing events from the front seat. I felt it on the streets of Nottingham. The pawn shops were overflowing: diamond rings, tea sets, right down to sheets and pillow cases people were forced to pawn. Those were hard, hard times.
Then, suddenly, I was there on the other side. I was present at a lunch for one of Thatcher’s speech writers. Reagan’s speech writer was there, too, along with other people from the world of politics.
Our host was raising a large slice of rare roast beef, impaled on a fork.
‘Are those miners being allowed to stop paying their mortgages while they’re on strike?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I think so,’ somebody answered.
‘Right,’ he said, blood and gravy spilling over his lips. ‘We’ve got them; we’ll force them to pay.’
I worked with some fabulous people on Connie, including the wonderful Pam Ferris. She’s a real roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-on-with-the-job type of person – a great joy to work with. Pam played Connie’s step-sister Nester. I remember being in the make-up room watching her on the monitor: ‘Whoa, she’s like a tank, she is so strong.’ I was still recovering and nowhere near back up to weight. I suddenly saw Pam as a rhinoceros. If she was a rhinoceros, I wondered what I should be. I wondered what animal could beat a rhinoceros. It dawned on me: I’d be a fox.
I thought of Renaud the Fox standing up on his hind legs, laughing and taunting that rhinoceros so badly that it charges full force and then, at the very last moment, stepping out of the way and letting the rhinoceros impale its horn and get stuck. That’s how you beat a rhinoceros. I’d worked out how Connie was going to beat Nester. I was so thin and tiny and Pam was big and angry and strong. I kept that image of the rhinoceros and the fox in my mind, because Nester was one of Connie’s primary adversaries.
When I was working on The Colbys I was very conscious that Sable was a panther. It’s hard to run faster than a panther, and they know how to laze extremely gracefully, with claws in or out. Sable was a panther. Connie was a fox. I use animal imagery a lot.
Peter Straker was one of my other co-stars on Connie. I called him ‘the Minister of Entertainments’. I’d known Peter since the days of Hair, back in the Sixties. He’s an enchanting, lovely man and a dear friend. It was through Peter that I met one of the most entrancing people who ever was – Freddie Mercury. When we met, Freddie and I had an immediate bond. He came to see me a few years after Connie had finished, when I was in The Rover in 1988. Afterwards, Freddie took me to Steph’s Restaurant on Dean Street for supper. I think we both recognized in each other that the private person and public person are very different. I treasure having known Freddie, even though it was for a sadly short time.
Peter Straker and me