Caring for my husband with dementia was a huge privilege

Actress Susan Hampshire tells LISA SALMON that looking after someone with the disease is ‘incredibly hard’, and urges people to look out for symptoms

- LISA SALMON

KNOWN for starring in film and TV classics like The Forsyte Saga and Vanity Fair, actress Susan Hampshire took on a different, and far more challenging, role in her later years.

The three-time Emmy award winner gave up acting to care for her husband, entrepreneur and theatre impresario Sir Eddie Kulukundis, after he was diagnosed with dementia.

But far from resenting the enforced change, Susan, 89, describes caring for her husband as a “privilege”.

“He was my husband and being able to step away from work to care for him full-time allowed me to spend so much time with him,” she says.

“That's something I'll always be grateful for. Yes, I gave up work to look after him, but if I hadn't, I would have missed that time with him.”

Although the Alzheimer’s Society says people with dementia may sometimes be physically or verbally aggressive as the disease progresses, Susan says her husband, who died in 2021 at the age of 88, was never like that.

“I felt very fortunate that despite everything, he remained kind and gentle throughout,” she remembers fondly of her second husband - she was previously married to French film producer Pierre Granier-Deferre, with whom she had a son. “That never left him - he was always good-natured, and always appreciated everything I did for him. He was never nasty, he was always very nice to me, and always very thoughtful. I'm heartbroken to lose him.

“It was a privilege to look after him.”

Since Eddie’s death, Susan, who is based in London, has fundraised for Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK) in his memory and has raised more than £1million to support the charity's search for a cure.

But she says she feels strongly that more needs to be done to spot the signs of dementia earlier, including the link with hearing loss. She has partnered with Boots Hearingcare to shine a light on how hearing loss can mask the early signs of the disease.