Bond star: I felt life slipping away when I got Covid
JAMES BOND star Colin Salmon has revealed how he nearly died when he fell ill with coronavirus on New Year’s Eve.
The actor was admitted to hospital for treatment after his entire family – his wife and four children – contracted Covid.
‘I felt like I was slipping away,’ said the 58-year-old, who played M’s right-hand man Charles Robinson in the Pierce Brosnanera Bond films.
He told Hello! magazine doctors saved his life. ‘If I hadn’t gone to hospital, I wouldn’t be here now,’ he added. In an interview at the family’s west London home, Salmon’s wife Fiona Hawthorne also revealed she was diagnosed with a rare lung condition two years ago, leading her to use an oxygen tank. Doctors warned her the illness, interstitial lung disease, made her more vulnerable to Covid. She said: ‘I felt flattened and had a thumping headache. Although it exacerbated my condition, I came through it.
‘I’m finding ways to live with it positively. I don’t want my illness to define me.’ Illustrator Hawthorne, 57, is publishing two books featuring art inspired by her time living in Hong Kong – one for children called The Extraordinary Amazing Incredible Unbelievable Walled City Of Kowloon and a coffee table hard-back titled Drawing On The Inside: Kowloon Walled City 1985.
The walled city – a densely populated Chinese enclave known for drugs and vice – was demolished in the 1990s.
‘For me and the people who lived there it wasn’t the awful place it is often portrayed as,’ Hawthorne said. ‘It was an industrious community and full of life.’
Read the full interview in Hello! magazine.