After a five year career break the Miranda and Call the Midwife star is back from the brink – and totally in love
09:42, 30 Nov 2025Updated 10:34, 30 Nov 2025
Miranda, 52, hid her battle with Lyme disease(Image: GL Weekend)
She called her tell-all book I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You. But now, comic Miranda Hart is utterly frank when she says she no longer courts fame and wants to keep things simple. She says: “I just wake up and think ‘right, what am I going to do today?’ It’s walking the dog, it’s playing games with my husband, watching telly and doing a bit of writing. I find life much “free-er” and happier, because of that. It is a very simple life, which I love.”
Miranda made her a sitcom queen, while viewers loved her as Chummy in Call the Midwife. But this great British funnywoman has taken a five year break from TV. And her ongoing battle with Lyme disease – revealed in her memoir earlier this year – has changed her. “When an illness takes everything away from your life,” she hesitates. “It rammed home to me sayings like ‘you are not what you do’ and ‘you can’t take it with you’ and all that stuff. It was so easy to hear. Until you are older and you are faced with suffering, you don’t realise how true that is. Now, life is pretty good. I think that’s because I’m much better at taking one day at a time.
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“I think I have always strived to have a manageable life, which is in line with my values. Not to say that it doesn’t have its difficulties, but I am just not rushing around doing things that don’t mean anything to me anymore. It is just calm and simple.” Miranda, 52, hid her battle with Lyme disease – a bacterial infection that can be spread to humans by infected ticks – from the public for years. Confessing to in her autobiography, she told how it had gone undiagnosed for 33 years.
Miranda in Call the Midwife(Image: BBC/Neal Street Productions)
Caused by tick bite in Virgina, USA, in her teens, when her family lived there, it triggered extreme fatigue, recurrent infections, joint pain, and cognitive difficulties in subsequent years. Bouts of debilitating weakness were initially misdiagnosed as anxiety-related disorders, including agoraphobia, and later as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) – also known as chronic fatigue syndrome.
Finally, she collapsed at home, becoming bedbound – at her worst. Feeling “alone in the darkness” of isolation, in 2020, during the Covid pandemic, she was eventually diagnosed with reactivated Lyme disease, which came as a tremendous relief. “Being misunderstood and misjudged is one of the hardest things about these kinds of conditions,” she says.
Forced to take stock, she is now enjoying life more than ever. “It was very interesting being known for playing a very jolly, playful character, which is of course part of me,” she says. “But then collapsing with illness and not being able to be that at all. I really did feel that. Before I became unwell, there was that sense like you have got to be ‘on’. You have got to be that certain type of person. People expected you to be that but, of course, it was a character and a part.”
Miranda and her husband Richard(Image: MAGICMOMENTSUK)
Becoming reflective, as her illness took hold, she realised she’d worked so hard in her 20s and 30s that she’d lost her sense of joy. She says: “I had this full circle moment. I realised I had been writing a character whose mission is to play and to tell the adult world to play and be silly, but I was fearful the second series would not do as well as the first and I got looped into the whole success of it. I lost my ‘play’. I lost joy by getting serious about my work. I wish I had not been so quite stressed about the series, but you feel you have to keep going and not let yourself or the audience down.”
Apart from doing the odd chat show, Miranda’s last major TV work was back in January 2020, when she marked the 10th anniversary of her BB1 sitcom with the celebratory special show Miranda: My Such Fun Celebration. The career defining show not only marked the success of her semi-autobiographical series, it also celebrated her 20 year career in TV, starting in 2001 with various sit-coms including Channel 4’s Smack The Pony.
It sounds strange, considering her comedy repertoire, to hear Miranda say that she lacked the confidence to act as a youngster. She describes her “foolish” shyness during her university years. “I did know always what I wanted to do,” she says. “I had this weird moment when I was seven, looking at comedians on the television, and I was so excited by adults playing and their silliness and joy. I just remember saying ‘If that is a job, that is what I want to do’. I wanted to jump into the television. So I always had this dream.
Miranda Hart is back… and happier than ever (Image: Instagram)
“But it took me until I was 26 to want to become an actress, as I was too embarrassed and shy. I went to university and I should have said I wanted to go to drama school. I took off after my first year at university to go to speech and drama school, but I tore up the acceptance letter. It just breaks my heart now. I am sure the show Miranda would have happened anyway and I would have been randomly writing books, but I should have followed my heart when I was 20.”
While she is contemplative now, she is also confident and hopes she will have a Christmas hit this year. Only this time, rather than being a TV show, she hopes it will be her new novel The Christmas Tree That Wanted to Dance that makes waves. The short story novel is the latest in a string of books she has written, as she balances her new life at home with her dog and new husband, building surveyor Richard Fairs, 60, who she married in secret last summer.
Having almost “given up” on getting married, she and Richard are understood to have brought the congregation to tears when they married to the Sound of Music classic Climb Every Mountain. They exchanged vows at a 1,000-year-old church in the picturesque Hampshire village of Hambledon, in a service attended only by a handful of family and close friends.
Miranda Hart as Miss Bates in Emma (Image: © Focus Features)
They had met when surveyor Richard was called in to help remove mould from Miranda’s home. Quickly hitting it off, they got engaged during a trip to Kew Gardens in west London, after falling “hopelessly in love with each other”. Now 18 months into her marriage, Miranda says: “We can’t envisage our lives apart can we? I think that is a great relief. I did not expect to get married, everything has been unexpected.
“The suffering has been unexpected and the good that can come from suffering has been unexpected and finding someone that completely understands me and gets me…he is the most incredibly patient person with me. To feel completely freeing and who I am…I am very loved. All of it, having an extraordinary moments of fame has been unexpected…the whole thing.
“The thing I love about it most, whether I have just come off stage at the 02 to 15,000 people, or being at home, I just like to be laughing and joyful. That is all that matters. I would not have expected to lose my joy, but to find it again has been the greatest gift ever.”
But if you think the new, calm, homeloving Miranda means Christmas cards all round this year, think again. Miranda laughs: “Do I love Christmas? Yes I do, as it is an invitation to play. But I don’t send Christmas cards. I hate Christmas cards. I also dislike this mad cultural pressure like ‘I have got to see these people before Christmas.’ People will send you these texts saying ‘We must catch up.’ I am like ‘No, we don’t. Why can’t we meet in February?’ Let’s just calm down shall we?”
* Miranda Hart’s new book, The Christmas Tree That Wanted to Dance, is out now.
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