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Dame Joanna Lumley has spoken about how a combination of factors, which included a painful health condition, resulted in her suddenly heading down to Kent when she was in the middle of
starring in a West End play. Dame Joanna, now 79, was in her early-twenties when she suffered what she describes as a "burnout". She told host of the ‘Hurt to Healing’ podcast
Pandora Morris that, as well as starring in a West End play doing eight performances a week, she was also looking for an au pair for her two-year-old son Jamie and visiting her cousin in
hospital. Dame Joanna said that, on top of all this she wasn’t being paid very well to appear in the play despite its high profile location, adding further pressure to an already stressful
situation, one compounded by the fact she was recovering from ovarian cysts. She explained: “The strain of having not much money, trying to find an au pair girl who would be suitable for
Jamie, trying to visit my sweet cousin in hospital who was like a sister to me who seemed to be dying and also I’d had an operation. “I’d had ovarian cysts and I’d been taken off stage, into
hospital, had the operation and came back far too soon, back into the same play, far too soon. I think 10 days after the operation I was back on stage. “And in those days, operations
weren’t kind of keyhole surgery, they’d cut you hip to hip and open the whole of you up, dig around, stitch you up. All these things conspired together to make a cocktail of horribleness and
horror that I couldn’t cope with, that’s the truth. I had a burnout, I couldn’t cope with it.” The pressure built to a point where Dame Joanna reached a breaking point, which resulted in
her suddenly deciding to go down and visit her parents, to whom she had sent Jamie, in Kent. She recalled vividly: “So one Saturday morning with two shows, a matinee and an evening
performance to come, I can remember getting up, by now I’d sent my little darling Jamie who was about two at the time, to stay with my parents down in Kent. “I got up that morning and found
that sitting in the corner of the room was good and the plan for the exit would be going to Charing Cross and catching a train and going down to see my parents and be with Jamie. Now no part
of my brain said ‘But you’re in a play! You’ve got a matinee at 2.30’. “I got down and I got to the station and I rang up and said ‘I’m at the station, could you come and get me?’ I can
remember mum saying ‘Darling you’ve got a matinee haven’t you?’ I said ‘No, I’m not going back’ and that was it.” Dame Joanna went onto say that she “went into a survival period where it
took me almost six months to get back to being normal” during which time she thought she wouldn’t go back to the stage ever again. However, the Absolutely Fabulous star admitted that, since
this fulcrumatic period in her life, she has done multiple plays. Dame Joanna is returning to the UK’s screens once again ‘Joanna Lumley’s Danube’, a travel series for ITV where she goes up
the Danube river. The programme is due to be broadcast today (May 30) at 9pm on ITV.