Miriam Margolyes launched Alzheimer’s campaign due to tragic link to the disease

Miriam Margolyes is best known for playing Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter franchise. She is renowned for being candid and not always in the most elegant way. Miriam had some health issues toward the end of 2023 but seems to be doing better.

Margolyes’ latest project involves a campaign with the Alzheimer’s Society to help raise awareness of the dreadful disease. One of the reasons she may be working with this charity is because she has had a family member affected by Alzheimer’s.

The Harry Potter star has recently opened up about her links to Alzheimer’s and how it affected her to watch the person she loved change due to the disease.

Miriam Margolyes’ father had Alzheimer’s

As reported by Express, Miram Margolyes’ father had developed Alzheimer's in his old age back in the 1990s. The 82-year-old actress revealed that at the time she didn’t know what Alzheimer’s was and that she suspected her father had issues but tried to ignore it.

In the early 1990s, I had a feeling that something was wrong, but I tried to push it away.

It was only when neighbours phoned me and said daddy was on their doorstep saying that they were in his house, that I realised he couldn't be left on his own anymore.

Adding that she was devastated to see that her father had become someone she didn't recognise anymore:

And that Alzheimer's, I didn't know what it was then, but the illness that had taken hold of him had a vice like grip, and my father was no longer the man I knew. It was utterly devastating.

Her father had become a ‘shell’ of the man he used to be. In the end, Miriam’s father passed away in 1995 at the age of 96.

Miriam Margolyes is helping launch an Alzheimer’s campaign

As per Express, Miriam Margolyes is helping Alzheimer’s Society launch a campaign on the disease to raise awareness on the ‘realities of living with dementia’.

Miriam opened up about the effects of Alzheimer’s on a relationship and that everything changes:

Unfortunately as you get older and when illness strikes, the whole basis of your relationship changes. Dependency changes, expectation changes, capacity changes.

She explains that the person you love and built a life with is 'changed utterly and forever':

The person that you fell in love with and longed to be with when you began your love affair, then at the end of your lives, there is a stark realisation that things have changed utterly and forever.

She added that she hopes she and her partner Heather Sutherland, with whom she had been in a long-term relationship, will be together until they are ‘both corpses’.

According to the Alzheimer’s Society, one in three people born in the UK will develop dementia in their life and is considered the country’s biggest killer.

Read more:

⋙ Danniella Westbrook heartbroken as her father passes away after years of battling dementia

⋙ Fiona Phillips: The tragic impact Alzheimer's had on her life years before she was officially diagnosed

⋙ Alastair Stewart: Everything we know about the GB News presenter’s career after dementia diagnosis

Sources used:

Express: ‘Miriam Margolyes 'utterly devastated' by family loss after tragic battle with Alzheimer's’