Miriam Margolyes shares health update: ‘I can’t walk very well’

Miriam Margolyes has shared a health update as she experiences difficulty walking, due to problems with problems her spine.

The 83-year-old Harry Potter actor has opened up about dealing with spinal stenosis – the narrowing of the spinal canal – which can cause compression on the spinal nerves. As the condition progresses, it can cause back and leg pain.

Margolyes said that she is now registered as disabled and has started using a mobility scooter.

“I can’t walk very well, and I’m registered disabled,” she told Closer magazine.

“I use all kinds of assistance. I’ve got two sticks and a walker and they’re such a bore, but I’ve just got a mobility scooter, which is a lot of fun.”

Last year, the Australian actor underwent major heart surgery to replace her aortic valve, and has since shared concerns that she won’t have enough money to cover her health and medical support costs as she gets older.

“I’m worried that I won’t have enough money for carers when I finally get paralysed or whatever it is that’s going to happen to me,” she told Radio Times.

“I’m saving up cash so that I can pay people to look after me and my partner. We don’t have children, so I need to make sure I’m going to be looked after in the way that I’ve become accustomed.”

The Harry Potter star also shared her reservations about starting to use a mobility scooter, in her latest BBC Two travel series, Miriam Margolyes: A New Australian Adventure. But she has since come to like using it.

“When I started kind of failing physically, I remember saying to directors and producers, please don’t show me clambering out of a car or climbing upstairs on my hands and knees.

“I didn’t want people to see that because I was embarrassed to see myself looking so pathetic.

“But, subsequently, I’ve met loads of people who have said I gave them the courage to do things that they never thought they could. So I’m very pleased about that.”

Margolyes is continuing to work, and makes regular TV appearances – with one recent Loose Women appearance causing a stir in the ITV studios.

She caused nervous laughter among the Loose Women panellists when she let a profanity slip live on air.

Speaking to Kaye Adams about her memoir, Oh Miriam, she said she wrote the book “because they paid me”.

When Adams enquired: “Can they pay you to do anything, Miriam?” the star responded with an inappropriate phrase that was immediately bleeped out.

After Denise Welch clasped her hands to her mouth in shock and Adams shook her head in disbelief, Margolyes asked: “Am I allowed to say that? Oh dear.”

Rephrasing her response to where she draws the line when it comes to earning money, the actor explained: “I wouldn’t eat faeces.”

The actor is returning to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August with her new show, Margolyes & Dickens: The Best Bits, which combines her passion for the work of Charles Dickens as she brings life to characters from his novels.