Miranda Hart has opened up on being forced to give up work due to her ill health, admitting that people stopped getting in touch.
The actress, 51, was recently diagnosed with Lyme disease after suffering the debilitating symptoms of fatigue, aches and loss of energy for three decades.
She went public with her health struggles for the first time in her new memoir I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You, as well as detailed falling in love with her now-husband.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Young Again with Kirsty Young, Miranda explained how ‘the hardest thing’ of her health issues was not being able to work.
She said: ‘You know that the hardest thing I found was letting go of work and the pain of not being able to work.
Miranda Hart has opened up on being forced to give up work due to her ill health, admitting that people stopped getting in touch
The actress, 51, was recently diagnosed with Lyme disease after suffering the debilitating symptoms of fatigue, aches and loss of energy for three decades
She went public with her health struggles for the first time in her new memoir I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You, as well as detailed falling in love with her now-husband
‘So, no, I couldn’t work because I became ill and I tried to keep going before the diagnosis and it didn’t go well, and, I feel like I want to say thank you to all those dear producers and directors that had to work with me when we didn’t know what was going on and I was so unwell, but I hated having to stop work.’
She continued: ‘I hated giving up work… The phone completely stopped ringing and no one texted me, nothing, absolutely nothing. Just a few very kindly people who’d occasionally touch in and go, “Just come back when you’re ready”.’
However, Miranda explained that her mystery husband had helped her heal following her years of ‘deep deep aloneness’ and gushed he was a ‘brilliant best friend of a man’.
She said: ‘I’ve been married twice on screen, but third time in real life. It’s very, very lovely. I mean, I pinch myself every day.
‘That longing I felt and that deep deep aloneness – I think if I hadn’t longed, if I hadn’t felt what I felt, then I wouldn’t have found him and I wouldn’t be here.
‘It led me to grieve for what I needed and to become the person I needed to be to connect, and so I now have this brilliant best friend of a man and we laugh every day.
‘He’s practically more ridiculous than I, which I never thought possible to find in a human being. He’s been part of healing. He’s helped me find my joy and meaning. It’s just wonderful. And he says the same for me, I should rather proudly add. It’s lovely.’
Describing their first date, Miranda recalled how the pair had bonded over pizza and fallen for each other.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Young Again with Kirsty Young , Miranda explained how ‘the hardest thing’ of her health issues was not being able to work (pictured last year)
However, Miranda explained that her mystery husband had helped her heal following her years of ‘deep deep aloneness’ and gushed he was a ‘brilliant best friend of a man’ (pictured in 2017)
She said: ‘I was determined on going on a date. [I thought] right, if I’m learning about how to be honest about who I am and love myself, then when a pizza delivery comes and it’s all, you know, shunted towards one end in the delivery.
‘It’s very upsetting… I thought, well no, I’m going to practice what I’m preaching and learning, so I just launched into this: “I’m really pissed off. Look at the pizza. Now it looks like a calzone, I hate calzones! They’re just pizzas folded. What is a calzone? This is really upsetting”.
‘And then you could see his sort of wide eyes and I thought, in the past I would have gone, “I’m so sorry, I’m an absolute idiot. Don’t look at me, I’m so silly ha ha.”
‘But I carried on about the pizza but it led to a very true and funny connection and brilliant date.’
In her new memoir, released earlier this month, Miranda talks about her plight and the moment she ‘collapsed’ from ill health, leading to her taking a near decade break out of the spotlight.
While fans know the comedian as Chummy in Call The Midwife and for her cheery self-titled sitcom, she admitted behind closed doors she was desperately telling doctors: ‘I feel toxic and poisoned.’
It took medics 33 years to discover Miranda had been battling with the bacterial infection Lyme disease, after initially mislabelling her as being agoraphobic – an anxiety disorder characterised by symptoms of anxiety in situations.
She recalls running out a doctor’s appointment in floods of tears after they told her she was ‘TATT’ – ‘Tired All The Time’ and said: ‘I just don’t know what to do with you.’
In her new memoir, released earlier this month, Miranda talks about her plight and the moment she ‘collapsed’ from ill health, leading to her taking a near decade break out of the spotlight
While fans know the comedian as Chummy in Call The Midwife and for her cheery self-titled sitcom, she admitted behind closed doors she was desperately telling doctors: ‘I feel toxic and poisoned’
The comic finally received the diagnosis in lockdown and believes she contracted Lyme disease when she 14 after battling nasty flu-like symptoms in Virginia.
She wrote: ‘For me it was the unnerving neurological symptoms that I had got initially, aged fourteen, from Lyme, which I always found particularly hard to deal with. And they got considerably worse as I headed into my forties. As did the fatigue from the cell depletion. Yup, all delightful.’
Of the moment she got her diagnosis, she added: ‘I got off that Zoom call, pulled my laptop shut and sat there, still and aghast. So many emotions, I was shocked, but I also immediately felt a deep well of sadness and disappointment – for over three decades I’d KNOWN there was something wrong.
‘I recalled all the times I’d told different doctors, “I feel toxic and poisoned, or, It’s like I have flu every day but I don’t have a temperature.”
‘(It’s amazing how the body can sometimes literally tell us what’s going on.) I felt anger rising at the times l’d been told I must have agoraphobia.
‘I would try and treat it as such, when, as it turned out, it was the lack of energy and the extreme light and sound sensitivity that made my body crash when going out to be in any kind of activity or stimulating environment.’
Miranda says she struggled to know how to share the news of her diagnosis with her followers, fearing she would be perceived as ‘complaining’ or ‘just tired all the time’.
But Lyme disease was causing havoc for her body and she ended up with ‘endless diagnoses’ and also, fans soon noticed her absence from TV screens.
She also spoke about her husband for the first time, confessing that she and the building surveyor ‘briefly’ split before realising the depth of their feelings for one another.
In her book, Miranda recalled that she was ‘spending more and more time’ with ‘The Boy From Bristol,’ as she calls him, and ‘feelings were deepening. And then. We had to take a break.’
‘There were a few reasons why, we didn’t know whether the timing was right to become an ‘us.’ It was hard. It hurt my heart. A lot. I didn’t know whether it was the end or whether circumstances might eventually mean we could continue getting to know each other.’
She added that ‘there was a brief ghastly emptiness from the disconnection,’ but ‘ultimately I trusted that it would work out for the best, and I had capacity to cope with either direction that it might take.’
She even threw a ‘sore Hart party’ with a friend, where they taste tested crumbles and she was allowed to ‘wallow’.
At the end of the book Miranda happily confirms that the couple reunited, and ‘The Boy From Bristol had something to share. The being angry and grumpy didn’t put him off. The body didn’t put him off, despite witnessing some massive mid-life inflation my inner critic did not enjoy!’
‘The vulnerability didn’t put him off. None of my wildness put him off… he came back to tell me he loved me.’
Going into detail about how he popped the question, the actress explained that her boyfriend suggested the couple go to the gardens for a walk on an ‘ordinary January day’.
Earlier this month, Miranda surprised her fans as she confirmed live on The One Show that she had secretly tied the knot with a mystery man
Speaking to Alex Jones and Alex Scott on the show, Miranda declared ‘someone’s put a ring on it’ as she revealed she met ‘my person’ at the age of 49
She wrote: ‘We stood still on the bridge overlooking the lake when the silence was pierced as he rather seriously said, ‘Miranda’. I turned around and as I did he got down on one knee. “Miranda…”
‘I don’t remember anything else because I simply burst out out crying, apparently saying yes before he had finished the sentence (awkward if he’d been tying a shoelace…)’
She emotionally penned: ‘I didn’t think a traditional proposal would affect me so. But there was someone knowing all my ridiculousness and brokenness and still willing to bend down, lookup and commit to loving me and standing by me for the rest of his life.’
Miranda made the shock revelation that the pair had secretly tied the knot in the final pages of the book.
She wrote: ‘I met my best friend and the love of my life who brings me more silliness, laughter, joy, support, care and safety than I thought possible in a person, because I lost my house due to mould illness and he was the building surveyor on the house remediation project.
‘Yes my love was Mr Mould Man/ My Mr Mould Man/ The Boy/ The Boy from Bristol/ The Boyfriend.
‘I haven’t been entirely honest with you, he’s not my boyfriend, he’s my husband. We got married when I was 51.’
Earlier this month, Miranda surprised her fans as she confirmed live on The One Show that she had secretly tied the knot with a mystery man.
Speaking to Alex Jones and Alex Scott on the show, Miranda declared ‘someone’s put a ring on it’ as she revealed she met ‘my person’ at the age of 49.
‘I’m married, I got married at 51 and it’s just so lovely! I’d written Gary for onscreen Miranda and it wasn’t until I was 49 that I met my person,’ she declared, but insisted she would keep her husband’s identity a secret.
‘It’s a little undercurrent in the book, I’m not going to reveal how we met because that’s a little bit of a twist. He’s my best friend, we had the best fun and I’m just thrilled to be a young bride at 51.’
The star added that she hoped readers of her book will feel hope from her love story, explaining: ‘The fact that I met someone during a pandemic, during chronic illness, when I couldn’t get out of bed or out of the house… I really, really wanted to meet someone, I didn’t want to do life on my own anymore.’
‘The fact that I could meet somebody, it’s not some some of romcom story but it’s hope. Whatever situation you are in, there is always hope, things really do change.’
