Actor Miriam Margolyes has expressed regret for once slapping her paralysed mother Ruth.
The 84-year-old actor said, of everyone she’s ever known, she would most like to apologise to her mum over a violent outburst. Ruth Margoyles died in 1974 aged 69.
Speaking to The Times, Margolyes said her mother was “unable to speak” as the result of a stroke, when the star hit her in a “frenzy of frustration”.
“And I will regret it till I die,” she said. “The terrible thing about a stroke is that sometimes you can’t communicate. And that, for both of us, was terrifying and awful.”
The actor said she “was overcome with horror” by her actions, adding: “It didn’t hurt her, but I hurt myself.”
In her 2021 memoir, titled This Much Is True, Margolyes detailed her devoted relationship with her mother. She later admitted to omitting the slap from the book.
“I didn’t mention something that I should have mentioned, and that was that I hit my mother when she was paralysed,” she said on an episode of the BBC’s Imagine documentary series.
Margolyes continued: “Anyone who’s been a carer will know how frustrating and difficult it is and I let that happen, I’m deeply ashamed of it.”
She added, tearfully: “The thing that really gets to me is that my mother forgave me. I hit her when she was paralysed and she forgave me.”
In her memoir, Margolyes called her mother “the rock” in her life. “Without a doubt, the most important person in my life was my mother. Perhaps she still is,” the actor wrote. “She bound me to her, quite deliberately, with emotional hoops of steel.”
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Ruth died in 1974, aged 69. Her health had deteriorated for seven years following her stroke, leaving her unable to move and barely able to speak.
Margolyes told her mother she was gay three days before the stroke occurred. “Mummy was not broad-minded in that sort of way, especially not with me. I was her creation, her only child,” she later told The Express.
“I don’t think I ever processed it at the time but I think my mother would not have allowed me to have a relationship with my partner. It was something she would not have accepted and that would have destroyed me.”
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