‘Absolutely Fabulous’ Star Joanna Lumley Says She Doesn’t Have ‘Much Time Left’

British actress Joanna Lumley is getting candid when it comes to death and her own mortality, revealing that she expects her “time must be coming quite soon.”

The Absolutely Fabulous star, who is celebrating her 79th birthday today, May 1, opened up in a new interview with My Weekly, where she said several of her “beloved friends are beginning to leave.” This revelation had Lumley in a reflective mood.

“As you near the top of the hill, you suddenly think: ‘Gosh, there’s not all that amount of time left,'” Lumley said. “My time must be coming quite soon and I don’t want to have wasted a minute of being on this beautiful planet.”

Lumley, who recently starred in Harlen Coben’s Fool Me Once on Netflix, noted how she “used to panic when I was young, but as I’ve got older, I’ve started literally to live day to day.”

“With age, you work out what matters. I always knew that good stuff would come along when I was older,” she added. “When I was 18, I longed to be 30. When I was 30, longed to be 50. We mustn’t be led into thinking getting old is bad. Growing old is good.”

The BAFTA-winning actress also shared her concerns about young people spending too much time on social media. “You need time in your head,” she shared. “I’m so afraid we’re going to breed a generation who don’t know the world and don’t know how to talk.”

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Lumley is best known for playing Patsy Stone in the hit 1990s British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous alongside Jennifer Saunders. More recently, she starred as Felicity in the British sitcom Motherland and its spinoff Amandaland. She will next be seen in Season 2 of Netflix’s Wednesday, portraying Grandmama Hester Frump.

“It’s wonderful. I get to wear many, many huge wigs, one on top of the other – and lots of quite constraining clothes, so I love it,” Lumley said of her Wednesday role.

She is also a long-time activist for human rights, most notably with her work for Survival International and the Gurkha Justice Campaign. Lumley was made a Dame (DBE) in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to drama, entertainment and charity.