AMANDA REDMAN ON Filming Good Karma was so spiritual it gave me a new bond with my mum
PLAYING a feisty doctor in feelgood new Sunday night drama Good Karma Hospital left actress Amanda Redman shedding real tears at times.
Because filming the ITV series set in India brought her closer to her mum who died three years ago – and to all the babies she has lost throughout her life.
And Amanda, 59, reveals the touching story of a struggling community hospital held together by a team of British and Indian medics who refuse to turn anyone away gave her a spiritual experience she had never expected.
“It was incredibly tough. I found every time I got a new script I cried more than I have ever done really,” says the New Tricks star.
“Each time I would find something I could relate to. I hope that the audience will too.”
Her beloved mum Joan had grown up in India, and while Amanda was filming in neighbouring Sri Lanka it was the third anniversary of her death at 86.
“I remember I was talking to her on my balcony and I just said, ‘Mum, I’m so glad I’m here because I feel closer to you’,” she says
INCREDIBLE
“It was absolutely right to be there, because it’s such a spiritual place and the people there are so spiritual. I know this sounds trite, but it’s true.
“I felt an incredible bond to my mum while I was filming. She lived in India until she was 12. I was weaned on curries, so the country has always been a part of my background and I just love it.
“I found myself contemplating things much more, and I’m not the sort of person who can sit still – I get bored easily.
“Yet I did more sitting and looking at sunsets and thinking about things than I’ve ever done before.”
And some of that contemplation was about her own tragedies as a mum – and she recalls weeping at a script about a couple deciding whether or not they can afford to save their ill baby girl’s life.
Amanda – who plays hospital head doctor Lydia Fonseca – has suffered nine miscarriages.
Now married to Damian Schnabel, 44, she says she is “incredibly close” to her only child Emily, 29, from her first marriage to actor Robert Glenister.
She has previously said: “I’d had two miscarriages before Emily and there were more after her. They never found out the reason but luckily Emily was a tenacious little bugger – she hung on.”
Her lost babies so affected Amanda she calls her students at the Artists Theatre School in Ealing her “surrogate children” and is a patron of the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust. Amanda stars in the exotic new drama with Men Behaving Badly’s Neil Morrissey, 54, and Downton Abbey’s Mrs Hughes, Phyllis Logan. The story revolves around the community hospital which turns out to be more like a home to the staff and patients – and it certainly made Amanda appreciate our own health service. “I think we are so lucky to have the NHS,” she says. “They are fantastic, even though they are under great duress.” The four- month shoot also made her learn to love the British weather as they worked in blistering 40C heat.
The costume department even had to change the cast’s clothing to help them cope.
“We had to wear loose clothes and ditch any make up. It was liberating. It was my ageing Shirley Temple look,” laughs Amanda.
SHUDDER
She also had to contend with the local wildlife, including a near miss with a deadly snake.
With a shudder, she recalls: “I was just sitting outside the hospital in between takes with a cup of coffee and suddenly a five-foot snake just appeared from the shadows, and I’m not exaggerating. It was just