The Absolutely Fabulous star said she doesn’t ‘want to have wasted a minute of being on this beautiful planet’
Joanna Lumley is 78 years old (Image: Getty)
Joanna Lumley has opened up about her views on ageing, revealing that an awareness of time passing gives her more vitality. The esteemed 79-year-old actor and comedian also admitted she often contemplates her own mortality.
“As you near the top of the hill you suddenly think, ‘Gosh, there’s not all that amount of time left’,” she said in a conversation with My Weekly, according to the Mirror. “All kinds of my beloved friends are beginning to leave.
“My time must be coming quite soon and I don’t want to have wasted a minute of being on this beautiful planet.” Joanna’s zest for life is apparent as she continues to pack her work schedule with exciting projects.
This year, she shone in the BBC comedy series Amandaland and also appeared in the Netflix drama Fool Me Once in 2024. Her latest ITV travel series sees her explore the 1,770-mile length of the River Danube, too.
Yet, things haven’t always been easy. The star previously told Vernon Kay on BBC 2 that she’s long suffered from prosopagnosia, which makes facial recognition very challenging.
“I’ve got this weird thing with faces, I’ve got a face blindness,” she said a few years ago on the Tracks of My Years podcast, the Express reports. “It’s called prosopagnosia.
Joanna still looks fabulous at the age of 78(Image: Getty)
“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’, it’s not to do with that, it’s completely different from that.
“It’s followed me and I never knew what it was. And 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.”
NHS guidance on prosopagnosia
The NHS explains that prosopagnosia often goes beyond facial recognition, leading to difficulties determining gender, age, and other things like cars or animals. Unfortunately, there is no treatment for the condition, but taking note of distinctive characteristics may help it feel less overwhelming.
“You’ll still see the parts of a face normally, but all faces may look the same to you,” the health service states. “It affects people differently. Some people may not be able to tell the difference between strangers or people they do not know well. Others may not recognise the faces of friends and family, or even their own face.”
Fortunately, Joanna hasn’t let prosopagnosia hold her back. The 79-year-old’s acting career has been marked by countless notable roles on small and big screens, from The New Avengers and Sapphire & Steel to Absolutely Fabulous, Finding Alice and Motherland.
In the ’60s, she was notably one of Ken Barlow’s first girlfriends in Coronation Street. And, on the big screen, she even worked alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Beyond her professional life, Joanna is married to Stephen Barlow, a 70-year-old conductor. She also enjoys a rich family life as the proud mother of Jamie, aged 57, and is a grandmother to two, Alice, 22, and Emily, 21.