THE character actress Miriam Margolyes has disclosed that confessing to her mother she was lesbian led to her having a severe stroke from which she never fully recovered.

“I was in my late twenties when I told my mother,” says Margolyes on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 today. “I spoke to her about an affair with a woman and three days later she had this stroke. I realised it was a mistake on my behalf. It was an indulgence of me to tell her that.”

Margolyes, 67, who has starred in films including The Age of Innocence and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, uses the episode to argue against the trend for actors and public figures to speak openly about their personal lives.

“I don’t agree with actors talking about their sex life,” she says, advising others to “keep such things to yourself” because of the distress they can bring.

The actress, who has also played in television series such as Blackadder and Miss Marple, says she told her mother Ruth about her sexuality some 40 years ago only because she was so close to her: “I now regret it because it caused the person I loved the most pain she could not bear. I should have been aware that to tell her was very wrong. It also hurts me that she was not then able to live to see my success.”

Sheadds : “ I was very shocked about what had happened to my mother since it began this terrible illness and led to this very black time in my life.”

Margolyes, who has been with the same girlfriend for nearly 40 years, also spoke out against the tendency for other gay actors to talk about their private lives. Sir Ian McKellen in 1988 became one of the first to discuss his sexuality. In the past, well known figures such as Sir John Gielgud and Dirk Bogarde never publicly admitted their homosexuality as they feared that it would harm their careers.

More recently, other gay actors such as Simon Callow and Rupert Everett have talked openly about their lives and two leading American actress-es, Cynthia Nixon, best known for Sex and the City, and Lind-say Lohan, have spoken about their lesbianism.

Margolyes, who has also appeared on stage in Wicked and with her one-woman show Dickens’ Women, chooses as one of her pieces of music on Desert Island Discs the hymn Jerusalem, in part because of the phrase “arrows of desire”. She speaks of how an early lesbian lover told her “she always thought of me with those ‘arrows of desire’ words”.

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