About a decade ago, Dame Harriet Walter, the 73-year-old star of stage and screen, decided to make a living will. The will, also known as an advance decision, informs family, carers and doctors of a person’s wish to refuse specific treatments should they become too ill to communicate those choices. (It stops short of requesting help with end of life; euthanasia and assisted suicide remain illegal in the UK.) But, when it came to actually completing the details of her living will, Walter always found something else to do.
“I had the will sitting in my filing cabinet for about three or four years before I got round to it,” says Walter, who made her name in the theatre but has recently had eye-catching roles in the TV shows Succession, Killing Eve and Ted Lasso. “It’s not something you really want to look at, it’s not something you want to think about. But it will be good to know that there’s something in place that you could use when the time comes. Then you close that filing cabinet.”
Walter’s reluctance is common. It came up earlier this month in the Observer in Rachael Stirling’s heartbreaking account of caring for her mother, Diana Rigg, in the final months before her death from cancer in September 2020. “As a nation we never talk about dying, or what it really looks like,” Stirling wrote, “even though it is one thing we’ve all got in the post.”
Stirling’s article has prompted renewed calls to change the law on assisted dying. The debate was picked up by the 83-year-old TV presenter Esther Rantzen, who is undergoing treatment for stage-four lung cancer and has joined the Swiss clinic Dignitas. Rantzen would like to see a free vote in parliament on assisted dying, telling the BBC it is “important that the law catches up with what the country wants”.
Walter, who has not previously spoken on the subject, first started thinking about assisted dying when she made the 2009 BBC film A Short Stay in Switzerland. The drama was based on the true story of Anne Turner (played by Julie Walters), a British doctor who had an incurable brain disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, and in 2006 became the 42nd Briton to end their life with the help of Dignitas. Walter played Clare, a fictional friend of Turner; her character vehemently opposed Turner’s decision because of her religious conviction that life is sacred.
“I found it really difficult to get behind that as an actress,” admits Walter. “And it did make me think: what is it that’s sacred about life? Does it continue to be sacred when it’s absolutely agonising and hopeless? And you’re in the last six months of your life anyway? You are just hurrying on something that’s going to happen anyway.”
Walter returned to assisted dying in the 2020 Sky Atlantic satirical drama The End. This time, though, her character was on the other side of the fence: a passionate supporter of the right to die. “I hasten to add that it’s easy to act something, it is very different when you come to face it in real life,” says Walter. “But one of the things that came out of these dramas I was involved in is that knowing the possibility is there doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to use it. It’s just a comfort to know that you could. And it’s long overdue to have a proper conversation about this, a national conversation.”
The last time there was a vote in the Commons on assisted dying was in 2015, when MPs overwhelmingly rejected a change in the law by 330 votes to 118. More recent polls, though, seem to suggest a shift in public attitudes: According to an Ipsos Mori poll in July, 65% of people in the UK believe it should become legal for a doctor to assist an adult of sound mind with less than six months to live to voluntarily end their own life, subject to high court confirmation. Advocates point to demographic changes, with a quarter of the UK’s population estimated to be 65 years or over by 2050. “I feel that the legal and political system needs to catch up with the public mood,” says Walter, “because people are increasingly aware of, or have connections with, people who are in this position.”
Eventually Walter, who lives with her husband, the American actor Guy Paul, in west London, couldn’t put off filling in her living will any longer. “There’s a certain point at which I wouldn’t want to be revived,” she says. “And I just said that if I could no longer communicate then I wouldn’t want to go on. Loss of speech yes, but blinking or any form of communication. If I couldn’t make my feelings known, I wouldn’t want to live.”
It wasn’t easy, Walter recalls, but she feels a sense of relief that she faced it down. “We’ve got to think about it, because it could happen to any of us,” she reasons. “And if we saw that there was a law that helped, I think people would mostly feel less frightened in the end rather than more.”
