Shirley Conran has led the most extraordinary life, from writing bestsellers Superwoman and Lace to helping create one of our most talented design dynasties
Shirley Conran has led the most extraordinary life, from writing bestsellers Superwoman and Lace to helping create one of our most talented design dynasties.
But now she’s revealed her most dramatic — and secret — challenge: surviving an operation to remove a brain tumour that was the size of an orange.
‘The odds were very high that I would die,’ she tells me.
‘The operation took five-and-a-half hours. When I came out of it, within hours I had two seizures, so I was in intensive care for two days.’
Shirley, who was married to Habitat co-founder Sir Terence Conran, first realised she was unwell last year. ‘I had what seemed like a spotlight on me, rapidly turned on and off,’ she says. ‘This turned out to be an epilepsy attack.’
MRI scans at St George’s Hospital in London revealed she had a brain tumour, but the doctors couldn’t tell if it was malignant, so decided not to operate. But months later her brain deteriorated ‘until I couldn’t walk, read or write and talked very slowly with a slurred voice’. She says: ‘I didn’t care much about anything — my sons or my sisters.’
Shirley, 87, has two sons with Sir Terence: the celebrated designers Jasper and Sebastian Conran. ‘This situation upset my children and my family, as they saw me turn into a vegetable,’ she says. The tumour enlarged rapidly and it was decided she needed an operation to remove it in January.
‘I was in hospital for ten days, then I was moved to the Kensington Care Home for a month. I came out at the end of February, and then the coronavirus pitched in and all the nursing homes shut.’
Shirley, who was married to Habitat co-founder Sir Terence Conran, first realised she was unwell last year. ‘I had what seemed like a spotlight on me, rapidly turned on and off,’ she says
She is now staying in the same road as Sebastian’s home in Notting Hill and is typically keen to get writing again.
‘They [the doctors] warned me very forcibly several times not to try to do any work until April,’ says the author, who coined the phrase ‘Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’.
She reveals she is now working on her memoirs. ‘For 40 years, people have been asking me to write my autobiography and I’ve always said no because it would bore me. When mine is finished, I will decide whether I want it published.’
It could be even more enthralling than one of her novels.
There can’t be many actresses with Dame Maggie Smith’s earning power at the age of 85. I hear the Downton Abbey star made almost £1.5 million last year.
Newly published accounts for the company she uses to channel her earnings, Dame Margaret Cross Productions, report shareholder funds of £6.58 million — an increase of £1.47 million on 2018.
To think, her son, the Earl of Grantham, had to marry an American heiress to rescue his finances in Downton.
Do young reality TV starlets all look the same? That’s the conclusion of Prince Charles’s favourite singer Sheila Ferguson, who was on I’m A Celebrity and The Real Marigold Hotel.
‘I tried to watch Love Island, but everybody [had] the same eyebrows, lips and cheeks,’ The Three Degrees star tells me. And pop singers are no different.
‘The acts are finely cloned facially,’ she claims. ‘Everybody seems to get plastic surgery after coming out of the womb.’
Love conquers all — even the virus crisis. I hear the enforced confinement has led to a proposal for Violet Fraser, granddaughter of the late D-Day hero Lord Lovat.
Violet, 47, is to marry Old Etonian barrister Alan Roxburgh, also 47. ‘They’re very happy although, of course, the wedding will have to wait,’ one of their delighted friends tells me.
Old-fashioned romance is returning to the dating scene thanks to social distancing, according to Nancy Dell’Olio
(Very) modern manners
Old-fashioned romance is returning to the dating scene thanks to social distancing, according to Nancy Dell’Olio.
‘We are going back to the 17th and 18th-century way of thinking, where you would have to write to your love,’ the former Strictly contestant tells me from her native Italy, where she has been in lockdown for the past three weeks.
Nancy, 58, former inamorata of ex-England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson and theatre director Sir Trevor Nunn, adds: ‘I still have my admirers messaging me.
‘It’s nice to see men writing more — and some of them are writing lovely things.’
Bellissima!