Don’t poke fun at dementia, pleads Carey
SHE has seen how the disease has affected her grandmother. So Carey Mulligan is angry at the way Alzheimer’s sufferers are often treated dismissively.
The Bafta-winning actress, 29, says it is wrong that shame and humour are frequently attached to dementia.
‘It’s quite quickly disregarded as being a sort of age-related thing. “Oh, granny’s lost her marbles” – that sort of throwaway comment about somebody who has a brain disease,’ she told Radio Times. ‘There’s not an awful lot of awareness in society.’
Miss Mulligan’s maternal grandmother Margaret Booth, once a gifted piano player and a geography teacher, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 14 years ago. Then in her mid-70s, she began having trouble remembering things and would sometimes struggle to find her own home.
Miss Mulligan told how she watched as dementia took hold of Mrs Booth. ‘One of the last times that we were at home together with her, we had a meal and she sat down and she looked at her knife and fork, and she didn’t know what they did,’ she said.
Now in a residential home in Wales, Mrs Booth has struggled to recognise her granddaughter for some eight years and is unaware of her success in films such as An Education and The Great Gatsby – even though she encouraged the young Carey to act and sing.
Miss Mulligan, a patron of the Alzheimer’s Society, wheeled her grandmother around a ‘memory walk’ last year in aid of the charity and to raise awareness about the disease, which affects 850,000 in the UK.
Her latest film, Far From The Madding Crowd, is out next week.