Brian Blessed’s honesty about his wife’s death is a lesson for all men (2024)

The actor has talked about the sadness of eating alone after the death his wife, actress Hildegard Neil

July 8, 2024 6:23 pm(Updated July 9, 2024 5:11 pm)

Brian Blessed isn’t exactly celebrated for touchy-feely, weepy moments.

But the booming actor – best known for belting out, “Gordon’s alive!”, in Flash Gordon – has revealed a new side, in talking about his late wife, actor Hildegard Neil. He was married to her for 45 years until she died from cancer last September.

Blessed, 87, described the sadness of eating alone and the solace of being with the animals in his garden: “I do feel quite lonely at times but I’ve got lots of friends to talk to.”

Those friends include Michael Palin, whose wife, Helen, died last year, after 57 years of marriage. Palin said of his wife’s death, “It’s like you’re a unit, and suddenly you are not a unit any longer, and it’s a bit like losing a bit of a limb. You’re not quite sure where you are”.

How good it is that British men – once global pin-ups for their stiff upper lips and bottled-up feelings – can now open up about grief and male loneliness?

The supposed watershed in this opening-up process was the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. Then the nation mourned openly and vocally; so much so that some of those affected were accused of “mourning sickness” – the over-sentimental, self-indulgent grieving for someone you’ve never known.

But male grief over a dead wife is something different – genuine and visceral. It was captured by Julian Barnes in Levels of Life, his 2013 book about his late wife, the agent Pat Kavanagh, who died at 68.

“I was 32 when we met”, he wrote, “62 when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart.”

Barnes agonised over what to do after she died. He considered suicide but then he resolved that “I must live as she would have wanted me to”.

In fact, Barnes’s thoughts on mourning were the latest in a long line of British meditations on death. Exactly 400 years ago, John Donne published the prose work Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes, with its famous lines:

The idea of the British as a flinty-hearted, dry-eyed lot is a modern one, growing out of the Muscular Christianity of the late 19^th century – the idea that there’s a moral and religious value in sport. There was an allied spirit in Victorian public schools, set up to inculcate no-nonsense toughness in boys trained to run an Empire.

So the 20^th and 21^st centuries have really been a gradual return back to the pre-modern days of British sentimentality. Given that Victorian expectation of robust manliness, it’s all the more moving when an older man of a conventional background – like Brian Blessed or Michael Palin – admits to grief.

CS Lewis did the same in A Grief Observed, his 1961 book on the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, the previous year. His grief was captured, too, in Shadowlands, William Nicholson’s play and film about CS Lewis.

Lewis wrote of his overwhelming sadness, “Is anything more certain than that, in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?”.

A similar opening-up about death has been going on for longer, with even greater personal divulgence, across the Atlantic, not least in The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir on the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

Didion wrote: “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”

It is also somewhere we will all reach one day – how helpful it is when sufferers describe the place before we get there.