Anna Friel: How close have you come to death?

Originally asked

The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Anna Friel said elsewhere, not written here

I nearly died by burst ovarian cyst in 2001. I was doing the front cover of a magazine and someone said, “Can you not pull your tummy in?” It turned out that I had been carrying two litres of blood in my stomach. I was rushed to hospital the next morning and nearly died of septicaemia. They had to give me two blood transfusions. Had it been an hour later it would have been bye bye.

The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 10 August 2019 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 209 →

Jason Donovan

Maybe in the 1990s, but I was so selfish at the time, I wouldn’t really have noticed what was going on.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 13 January 2024 source ↗

Robert Peston British journalist

Being driven across the Atlas Mountains in a snowstorm 25 years ago, by a local taxi driver who plainly put a lower premium on the advantages of living than me.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 June 2018 source ↗

Shaun Ryder English singer

I had a gun shoved in my eyeball in New York by a crack dealer in the 1980s. I have also watched somebody next to me get shot in the head in a gun battle – that was in Jamaica in the early 1990s.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 August 2017 source ↗

Julian Clary English actor, comedian, novelist and presenter