Dame Joanna Lumley is arguably one of the most iconic faces in British television, but the actress has now revealed that she suffers from face blindness, or prosopagnosia, which makes her unable to recognise faces.
Speaking on the Tracks of My Years podcast with Vernon Kay, the 77-year-old admitted it’s “a weird thing”, but shared the coping strategies she had developed over the years.
She told the BBC radio DJ: “This is why I kiss everybody.
“I kissed you today. A, because I wanted to. B, because I actually didn’t know whether I knew you or not. I can’t tell.”
“I kiss so many strangers, they go; ‘Get off!’ And I go; ‘Look, do I know you? Was I married to you? Who are you?’ I literally don’t know!”
When she’s going to large events, Dame Joanna also ensures she gets told who exactly will be there ahead of time and emphasised that it has nothing to do with her meeting so many people as a public figure.
She added: “It’s completely different from that. It’s followed me and I never knew what it was.”
Before the actress had a name for her disorder, she used to “test” herself, saying: “I’d look at somebody and then I would shut my eyes and see if I could see their face in my head. And I couldn’t.”
Dame Joanna revealed that the biggest impact she feels from the disorder is at public events where she’d offer to get someone a glass of wine only to not recognise them when she returned with the drink.
She added: “Sometimes I don’t know whether I’ve seen that person that day or whether I should’ve seen them.”
The former model recalled one particular moment when her prosopagnosia made her first meeting with Sir Rod Stewart quite awkward.
Dame Joanna explained that when she had just started delving into acting, she had been asked to present “some football prize” at a ceremony in London where avid footballer Sir Rod also took part.
The actress got a bit flustered as the person she was presenting the prize to wasn’t even at the ceremony.
She recalled being berated by the ceremony organisers who told her: “Don’t be stupid, he’s not here. You’re just announcing it.”
Sir Rod, on the other hand, was “so nice” to her in the moment of chaos which made her feel incredibly bad as: “I knew he was a famous rockstar but I didn’t know which one.”
Despite this, the actress and musician started chatting and a short-lived romance blossomed from Dame Joanna’s blunder at the awards.
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