Dame Joanna Lumley made the heartbreaking admission that she ‘doesn’t have much time left’ as she turned 79.
The actress and TV host has appeared on our screens for more than five decades. She started by starring as a Bond girl in the 1960s, then as a spy in the New Avengers in the ’70s, and later as the drunken character Patsy Stone in the ’90s.
And the Brit is set to star in the hotly anticipated second series of the Netflix blockbuster, Wednesday.
Joanna celebrated her 79th birthday on May 1, and the iconic actress opened up about her mortality, admitting that she may not have much time left.
‘As you nearly the top of the hill, you suddenly think, “Gosh, there’s not all that much time left,”‘ she told Vernon Kay on BBC Radio 2.
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.
‘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.’
Dame Joanna also spoke to Vernon about her health struggles over the years.
The actress also opened up about her experience living with prosopagnosia, a condition that hinders the ability to recognize familiar faces, including those of friends and loved ones.
Joanna previously joked that she ‘kisses everybody’ because she can’t always tell who exactly she knows.
‘I’ve got this weird thing with faces, I’ve got a face blindness. It’s called Prosopagnosia,’ she said last week.
‘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.
‘I mean, lots of people say “oh but you meet so many people”, but it’s not to do with that, 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 previously admitted that she ‘loves’ smoking, and puffs on anything between one and 40 cigarettes a day.
She joked that smoking has contributed to her fitness.
‘I am unbelievably fit,’ she said.
‘Despite, or probably because of smoking, I am never ill. I have these extraordinary procedures.’
After dreaming of becoming an actress as a teenager, Joanna was turned away from drama school before becoming a model in London during the Swinging Sixties.
She later took up small-time acting roles before landing a place in the 1969 James Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
It wasn’t until a few years later, however, that she hit the big time playing Purdey in The New Avengers.
And Joanna has no plans to retire, telling crowds at the SANDS International Film Festival a couple of weeks ago that ‘she’ll be there’ as long as she can speak.
‘When I was 16 and told the careers officer at my convent school that I wanted to go into acting, he told me that the only jobs open to me in film would be as a continuity or make-up girl,’ she added.
‘In the past women like me would have been sidelined at 38 but now there are lead parts for people in their 50s and big parts for those in their 70s.’
