The British actor Hugh Bonneville has recalled the heartbreaking details of when he learned his mother, Patricia, who was a secret spy in MI6, had died.
The Downton Abbey star, 62, opened up for the first time about the sad loss, explaining that he received the news while on holiday in the Maldives at Christmas in 2014.
"I woke up to two missed calls from my brother. I thought my father's died and I rang him, and my mother had died," Hugh said on the Travel Secrets podcast.
"That was a heck of a heck of a moment, which is imprinted in that way - where you were when JFK was shot sort of way.
He added: "There was a whole sort of few days of organising getting home and that sort of thing. And then the journey home... When you've lost someone, there's nothing you can do, but the journey to get to the place where you are.
"Then with your other relatives, [it] takes on a strange significance and you go through the rolodex in your brain of the life that's gone and what needs to happen next."
Patricia - whom Hugh learned later in life worked for the UK's secret intelligence service MI6 - died aged 85. Her death was the first in what came to be a prolonged period of family loss that would deeply affect the actor.
Allowing himself to grieve
He explained that it wasn't until three years after Patricia's death that Hugh allowed himself to properly grieve. "I can remember literally hundreds of letters coming in about my mum - and not reading them," he said.
"My brother and my sister did, and I was so busy doing death certificates and this, that, and the other... I literally put them in a plastic bag."
While filming Viceroy's House in Jodhpur, India, Hugh took himself away at the Mihir Garh hotel to finally read the letters.
"I thought now is the time just to go on my own... I'll just go and read all these letters and have that cathartic experience, and it was. It was beautiful, and I realised how much my mum had meant to so many different people from more walks of life. I had a good, good, good cry and let it out," he explained.
"Grief is a funny thing, isn't it? In the way that it ebbs and flows like waves on the shore, and sometimes the same memory can trigger laughter. And then the next time that same memory occurs to you, you can be in a veil of tears."
Secret spy
Hugh - who shares son Felix, 21, with his ex-wife, Lucinda Williams explained the interesting way he found out about his mother's interesting career.
"She worked for I can't remember how long, maybe ten years. And then many, many years later, when both she and my dad had retired, I opened the newspaper one evening and it said, MI6 building to be sold off. And I said, that's my mum's office," he said.
"At the funeral, I said to my dad, did she ever talk about it? He said, no, absolutely not, never. And then my sister came up to me and said, you know, there's a few people here from MI6 here.
"She said, two of them live in the mum and dad's valley locally. I said, you're kidding? She said, yeah, her over there, him over there. And I said, what, Derek? He's the most boring man on the planet. And she said, well, yeah, duh."
Hugh's family losses
Two years after his mother died, Hugh unexpectedly lost his brother Nigel, who died unexpectedly in his sleep, followed by his father John, a surgeon, in 2020 at the age of 93.
The loss of his immediate family had a profound effect on the Notting Hill actor, who admitted the ordeal left him "quite good at death"
"Frankly, we all do it," he said. "I became very good at the administration of death - you know, we've got to do this, we've got to do that. And so actually, the necessity of grieving can get kicked down the road."
Talking about the loss of both of his parents, he added: "When you become an orphan, when both your parents are gone, that's a significant shift."