HART OF THE MATTER
Why Miranda lost her smile
Miranda Hart has a natural gift for making millions of people smile, but the one person she struggles to make happy is herself.
The funnygirl has battled the blues for much of her adult life and, in her twenties, suffered such severe anxiety, she couldn’t leave the house.
But now, a year after her latest bout of overwhelming sadness, Miranda (44) says she has used her experiences to write a children’s book called The Girl with the Lost Smile.
The star of her own sitcom says she’s feeling good now, but this time a year ago, she was fighting feelings of isolation and self-pity. It skewed her outlook on the world, she reveals.
“When a low mood sinks in, you find yourself almost revelling in the awful world news and feeling self-pityingly about the tiniest things. I went into a fury simply because I couldn’t find a Biro. It’s easy to spiral into seeing just the negative around us and then simply not smiling. I found nothing could prompt an upward turn to my mouth.”
Miranda pulled out of several commitments, including hosting the Royal Variety Performance and returning to her role as Chummy in the TV series
Call the Midwife. Succumbing to that “old back to school feeling” made her realise how many people were struggling with similar issues.
“It struck me how there were so many people in the world for whom there is genuinely very little, if anything, to smile about. And they are often the ones who keep doing so, who put on a brave face, staying cheery despite everything.”
That’s partly why she wrote The Girl with the Lost Smile, about an 11-year-old who has all kinds of adventures when she goes in search of her missing smile. “That was a story from the heart.”
She believes genes are partly responsible for her depression. “A sort of anxiety runs in the family. It’s just bad genes – bad luck, really. I’ll always have to force myself to see the positive because I am wired badly, I’d say.”
Miranda’s family has an aristocratic background – there are numerous earls and dukes among her ancestors, and she is the fourth cousin, twice removed, of Princess Diana.
Her father Captain David Hart Dyke was an officer in the Royal Navy and in command of the destroyer HMS Coventry, which was sunk during the Falklands War. Nineteen of his men were killed and he was missing for several days. He suffered severe burns in the attack.
Several years later, David was sent to the US for work, so when she was 11, Miranda was sent to boarding school for girls. Shy and awkward, she stood out at 1.85m tall, but says it wasn’t too torturous.
But at university, where she studied political science, she felt awkward and unfeminine, and by the time she graduated, she was suffering from severe anxiety and agoraphobia. She moved back in with her parents and was unable to leave the house. “I thought the world was a bit scary. I just hid in a room in the house and didn’t really go out. It was my blip.”
Antidepressants helped – although they also led to weight gain – but she has since had more bouts, including one following the break-up of a long-term relationship in 2007. Getting her dog Peggy, who she wrote about in the book Peggy andMe, helped on that occasion.
“I was lonely, isolated, depressed and uncertain
I could ever love or be loved again. I was grateful to have something to cuddle... I felt my heartbreak recede.”
She was thrilled when her sitcom Miranda – which started out as semi-autobiographical skits at comedy festivals before becoming a radio show and then TV series – became a huge hit in 2009. But the pressure that comes with success took a toll.
She seriously thought about quitting her career at the end of 2012. “I got to a point when it was all a bit too much and I was quite lonely, and was struggling. I thought, ‘Is it worth it?’”
‘ It’s easy to spiral into seeing just the negative around us and then simply not smiling’
But she talked herself out of her low spirits. “You find ways to manage your life that means you are not in that place.”
Today she is doing well. She recently finished a stint in the West End musical Annie, playing orphanage boss Miss Hannigan, which she says was a dream come true. And she’s appearing alongside Keira Knightley, Dame Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman in the movie The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, due to be released next year.
Although she finds it difficult not to be hard on herself, she is getting better at taking praise and can’t imagine doing anything else. “The best thing is hearing a laugh. It dawned on me recently that I am allowing myself to think, ‘The sitcom I wrote did all right.’ I have had so much lovely feedback and I feel now, as I get older, that is my mandate to work. It’s just not to work and make people laugh, it’s for escapism.
“Life is s*** and we all need an escape.”