Actress Sophie Winkleman has said she expected to die when she broke her back in a car crash last year.
The actress, who is married to Lord Frederick Windsor, the son of the Queen’s cousin Prince Michael of Kent, said the kindness of the royal family has aided her recovery.
She told Hello! magazine she was travelling from the set of the Danny Boyle series Trust in Cambridgeshire on November 23 2017, when the car she was travelling in was hit by another.
Her vehicle was thrown into the air before crashing down and causing her life-threatening injuries, which left her without feeling in her legs for three days.
The former Peep Show star is a mother to daughters Maud, four, and Isabella, two, and is the half-sister of Strictly Come Dancing star Claudia Winkleman.
She said: “It’s very strange, when something huge happens to your body, you don’t immediately feel the pain.
“I felt lots of warmth and a strange kind of serenity. I felt like my soul was rising up and seeing everything… Yes, I did expect to die. It was extraordinary.”
She added: “I just remember a massive great thwack and then lots of hot blood all over me.
“I recall heat; I had broken my back and ruptured my abdomen so my belly was torn apart and basically in my lap.
“I could feel my backbones jiggling around and I thought: ‘I really hope this doesn’t mean anything paralysing.'”
Winkleman spent three days in Addenbrooke’s Hospital before she began to regain feeling in her legs.
She said: “I had been a couple of millimetres away from paralysis.”
Two weeks later she was transferred to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, where she finally walked again, and remained until Christmas Eve.
She added she received a “magnificently practical” gift from the Prince of Wales to aid with her recovery.
She told the magazine: “Prince Charles sensed correctly that everything would be chaos at home, so he asked his cook, instead of taking care of him, to take care of us.
“So our lunches and dinners were cooked at Clarence House then delivered for weeks on end while I was in hospital and then still disabled at home.”
She added that the Duke of Cambridge, who is her husband’s cousin, phoned the hospital to ensure she was well looked after.
She said: “I heard from pretty much every member of Freddie’s family, I was spoiled to bits by them.”
Read the full interview in Hello! out now.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here