Joanna Lumley recently commented on ageing, revealing that thinking about the passage of time actually boosts her energy. The renowned 79-year-old actress and performer also admitted that 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 earlier this year. “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 enthusiasm for life shows as she keeps filling her workload with engaging projects.
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In 2025, she starred in the comedy series Amandaland, a spin-off of the acclaimed sitcom Motherland, produced for the BBC. Its Christmas special is scheduled to broadcast on BBC One from 9:15pm tonight (December 25), with season two expected to premiere in 2026.
Joanna has also recently featured in the Netflix drama Fool Me Once and participated in a three-part ITV travel documentary exploring Europe’s Danube River. However, her journey hasn’t always been smooth.
The star previously told Vernon Kay on BBC 2 that she has struggled with prosopagnosia for years, a condition that makes recognising faces 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.
“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.”
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NHS advice on prosopagnosia
The NHS states that prosopagnosia frequently affects more than just face recognition, leading to difficulties in determining gender, age, and differentiating objects like vehicles or animals. Unfortunately, there is no cure for this condition, but recognising distinctive features can help manage it more effectively.
Official online NHS guidance explains: “You’ll still see the parts of a face normally, but all faces may look the same to you. 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 allowed prosopagnosia to limit her success. The 79-year-old’s distinguished acting career spans numerous memorable performances across television and cinema, including The New Avengers and Sapphire & Steel, as well as Absolutely Fabulous, Finding Alice, and Motherland.
In the 1960s, she was notably among Ken Barlow’s earliest girlfriends on Coronation Street. She also appeared on the big screen, working alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Joanna is married to Stephen Barlow, a conductor. She also enjoys a rich family life as the proud mother of Jamie, and is a grandmother to two, Alice and Emily.
