Harry Potter star, 83, says she ‘doesn't have long to live' after heart operation
The star revealed she now has a 'cow's heart' after having major surgery
HEALTH UPDATE Harry Potter star, 83, says she 'doesn't have long to live' after heart operation
HARRY Potter star Miriam Margolyes has revealed she "doesn't have long to live" after undergoing a major heart operation.
The actress, 83, known for playing Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter franchise, had procedure called transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) in 2023.
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Miriam Margolyes has revealed she 'doesn't have long to live'
Credit: Rex
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The actress said she is convinced her life expectancy is around five or six years
Credit: Getty
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Miriam (middle) known for playing Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter franchise
Credit: Alamy
This involved having her heart valve replaced by one taken for a cow after suffering a health scare.
Miriam said she is convinced her life expectancy is around five or six years as she shared a new update.
The TV star said: "When you know that you haven't got long to live – and I'm probably going to die within the next five or six years, if not before, I'm loath to leave behind performing. It's such a joy."
"I yearn to play roles that don't confine me to wheelchairs, but I'm just not strong enough," she added in a new interview with The Times.
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Miriam previously opened up about her health issues on the Table Manners podcast with Jessie and Lennie Ware.
She said: "I've got a cow's heart now. Well, not the whole heart. I've had an aortic valve replaced by a cow's aortic valve."
When singer Jessie asked if that was quite a common thing, Miriam joked: "I think it's rather refined, actually!"
She continued: "I don't know how common it is. I'd never heard of that operation. But it saves you from having open heart surgery, which would be infinitely more invasive."
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Miriam went on to explain the incredible technique doctors used to perform the operation.
She revealed: "They made two little holes in your groin. One in each groin and then they shoved this thing through.
Harry Potter cast in bitter feud as Hogwarts actors slams 'derogatory comments' made by huge co-star
"And I don't know how they pull it up but they sort of pull it up with stereos. And then when it comes to the point, when it's in your heart, they pull a little string and it goes pow!
"And lo and behold, your artery or your aortic valve is shoved unceremoniously to the side."
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Miriam sparked concern back in May 2023 when she was rushed to hospital with a chest infection.
She updated fans on social media with a snap of her on the ward.
Sharing a photo of her in a hospital gown from her bed, she said: "Thanks to my precious friends who thought of me on Tavi Day. I did survive and I am still in The Royal Brompton Hospital certainly till Sunday.
"I am growing energy but it's still not quite me."
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The star later told Vogue that she may have to go under the knife, following the "unexpected" health issue.
She revealed: 'When you're young, you never think about death. You just think about your next f*** basically. I think about death a lot."
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Miriam had procedure called transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) in 2023
Credit: Facebook / Miriam Margolyes
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The star revealed she now has a 'cow's heart' after having major surgery
Credit: Alamy
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New Statesman
2 hours ago
- New Statesman
Bruce Springsteen faces the end of America
Photo montage by Gaetan Mariage / Alamy When I met Patti Smith soon after Donald Trump's first victory, she said she'd ended up next to him at various New York dinners over the years, back in the Seventies, when he was pitching Trump Towers. 'We were born in the same year, and I have to look at this person and think: all our hopes and dreams from childhood, going through the Sixties, everything we went through – and that's what came out of our generation. Him.' Smith's sing-song voice was in my head at Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on one of the final nights of Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour. Springsteen was born three years after Trump and will also have sat at many New York dinners with him. Those with half an eye on the news would be forgiven for thinking that Bruce has been lobbing disses at the president from the stage between his hits, but his latest show is heavier than that: a conscious recasting of two decades of his more politicised music, with a four-minute incitement to revolution in the middle. Here is a bit of what he says: 'The America I love and have sung to you about for so long, a beacon of hope for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring. In America right now we have to organise at home, at work, peacefully in the street. We thank the British people for their support…' Clearly few in the US are speaking out like this on stage, and Trump has responded by calling Springsteen a 'dried-out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)' and threatening some kind of mysterious action upon his return. Springsteen, the heartland rocker, was never exactly part of the counter-culture, though he did avoid Vietnam by doing the 'basic Sixties rag', as he put it, and acting crazy in his army induction. Yet he has become a true protest singer in his final act. He wears tweed and a tie these days, partly because he's 75 and partly, you suspect, to convey a moral seriousness. When I last saw him, two years ago, I thought I saw some of Joe Biden's easy energy. Well, Bruce still has his faculties. The feeling is: listen to the old man, he has something to say. Springsteen's late years have been something to behold. At some point in the last decade he stopped dyeing his hair and started to talk in a stylised, reedy, story-book voice. The image of the America he seemed to represent shifted back from Seventies Pittsburgh to Thirties California: the bare-armed steelworker became the Marlboro Man, and in 2019 there was a Cowboy album, Western Skies, with an accompanying film in which he was seen on horseback. His autobiography Born to Run revealed recent battles with depression. And it is depression you see tonight in Liverpool – in the wince, the twisted mouth, the accusing index finger; in his entreaty to Liverpool's fans to 'indulge' his sermon against the American administration, delivered night after night, to scatterings of applause. It is a depression I recognise in older American friends who fear they're going to the grave with everything they knew and loved about their country disappearing. But depression is also the stuff of life, of energy. Springsteen has been particularly angry since the early Noughties, since the second Bush administration, but this is his moment somehow, and his song of greedy bankers – 'Death to My Hometown' – is spat out with new meaning in 2025, an ominous abstraction. The father-to-son speech in 'Long Walk Home' feels different in this politically charged world: 'Your flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't'). A furious version of 'Rainmaker' ('Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, they'll hire a rainmaker') is dedicated to 'our dear leader'. As much as I admire Springsteen and seem to have followed him around and written about him for years, the Land of Hope and Dreams tour made me realise I hadn't fully known what he was for. When I saw him in Hyde Park in 2023, the first 200 yards of the crowd were given over to media wankers like me, with the paying fans at the back: every single person I had ever met in London was there, mildly pissed up and whirling about with looks of mutual congratulation. Springsteen had become, to the middle classes and above, a global symbol of right-thinking, summed up by his long stint on Broadway at $800 a ticket. His dull podcast with Barack Obama was the American version of The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell: men saying stuff you want them to say, to confirm what you already think about stuff (Obama was in awe of Bruce). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Politics was easy for Springsteen when politics consisted of external events happening to innocent people, rather than something taking place on the level of psychology, in a movement of masses towards a demagogue. The job he adopted, back in the Seventies, was to set a particular kind of American life in its political and historical context: to tell people who they were, and why they mattered. His appeal as a rock star always lay less in his words than in how sincerely he embodied them: his extraordinary outward energy, his mirroring of his audience, his apparent concern with others over himself. After 9/11, someone apparently rolled down a window and told him, 'We need you now,' so he wrote his song 'The Rising' from the viewpoint of a doomed New York fireman ascending the tower. A recent BBC documentary revealed he'd donated £20,000 to the Northumberland and Durham Miners Support Group during the strikes of 1984 – rather as he donated ten grand to unemployed steelworkers in Pittsburgh the previous year. 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It is hard to underestimate the psychological shift Springsteen might be undergoing, in seeing the working men and women of America moving to a politics that is repellent to him. He has not played on American soil since Trump's re-election and it is likely that this kind of political commentary there will turn the 'Bruuuuuce' into the boo. A Springsteen tribute act in his native New Jersey was recently cancelled (the band offered to play other songs, and the venue said no). Last week, a young American band told me they won't speak out about the administration on stage because they're not all white and they're afraid of getting deported. It is the job of the powerful to do the protesting, and, like Pope Leo, Springsteen's previous good works will mean nothing if he doesn't call out the big nude emperor now. 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Daily Mirror
5 hours ago
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Scottish Sun
8 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Horoscope today, June 7, 2025: Daily star sign guide from Mystic Meg
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) OUR much-loved astrologer Meg sadly died in March 2023 but her column will be kept alive by her friend and protégée Maggie Innes. Read on to see what's written in the stars for you today. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up ♈ ARIES March 21 to April 20 The contact who loves sharing comedy clips with you could be a serious business partner. So talk or write about your dreams today together. Your boundary- setting zone is sensitive, but also go-ahead. If big plans can't happen exactly as you wish, you are flexible enough to find attractive alternatives. 3 Your weekly horoscope for Saturday ♉ TAURUS April 21 to May 21 Firebrand Uranus boosts your independence, while Venus helps you stick up for a change you believe in. A project with some public performance gets closer, and words and music mix in wonderful ways. Read more into a gift from someone you may not know well, yet. Luck opens a violet door. Get all the latest Taurus horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♊ GEMINI May 22 to June 21 Hidden hopes and fears grow stronger in the shade today, and sharing them with 'M' lets some light in. But your best adviser now is yourself, don't silence any inner voice telling you where to go. Stepping away from work can help you see a situation more clearly – find the words and actions you'll need. Get all the latest Gemini horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♋ CANCER June 22 to July 22 Maybe a travel or study plan is moving faster than you expected – but that doesn't mean you can't keep up. chart encourages playing a little less safe, even if you can't be totally sure of the outcome. A family recently doubled in size has some luck tips to share. Love waits in a 'B' friend's contacts list. Get all the latest Cancer horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♌ LEO July 23 to August 23 You are ready to climb high and leave old ambitions behind – as fresh goals come your way from someone younger. This may ask a lot of you, but you have so much to give. Love confidence links to telling the truth, so don't be tempted to lie. Luck links to a pattern of musical notes. Get all the latest Leo horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♍ VIRGO August 24 to September 22 The moon and Venus sometimes make a confusing communications team – as opposite opinions clash. But your key skill today is winning over all kinds of people. Maybe someone close is changing – but so are you. Together you can create a new normal that's better and more lasting. Get all the latest Virgo horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions 3 There's a 'happy ever after' atmosphere in your chart as Venus moves on Credit: Getty ♎ LIBRA September 23 to October 23 Moon resilience helps you bounce back when no one expects it. Second chances are your zodiac speciality, and your natural fairness is bigger than pride. Someone recently relocated, maybe just in the short term, shares a picture that can change everything. Love heads back to its best. Get all the latest Libra horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♏ SCORPIO October 24 to November 22 Confidence rises in passion terms and in regard to the respect you think you deserve. If people have not matched your hopes, this can change by tonight. While an open-air exercise class or music session inspires love feelings. Your fulfilment chart feels tough, but you'll stay in charge. Get all the latest Scorpio horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♐ SAGITTARIUS November 23 to December 21 Work through your options today and make a shortlist, based on where you want to go rather than where you've already been. Prizes can feature a sunshine factor, from holiday foods to island locations. Love can start – and be such a surprise – when you spot a workmate in a leisure setting. Get all the latest Sagittarius horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♑ CAPRICORN December 22 to January 20 Surprises of the zodiac now centre on your chart, so be ready to give, and receive, wonderful feelings. Single? There can be a follow-up to a message sent months ago. Mars makes short cuts seem so tempting, especially in terms of physical change. It's vital to tick all boxes, now you've done your best. Get all the latest Capricorn horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions 3 Mars makes waves at work by questioning why things always need to be done one way – when you see a much better method Credit: Supplied ♒ AQUARIUS January 21 to February 18 You are ready to move from thinking about a family change to making it happen – yes, you have all the ingredients you need. When you add in ability to believe in your own strength, you shift to next-level success. Mars sparks love at first sight, as two style icons pass each other, perhaps in slow motion. Get all the latest Aquarius horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♓ PISCES February 19 to March 20 Celebrate the small, quiet aspects of love all day – a partner will adore how cherished you can make them feel, with actions rather than gifts. Single? Someone who seems almost dull at first, is hiding a heart of gold. The Mars effect encourages outrageous menus – and prize-winning flavours. Get all the latest Pisces horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions
