Beloved actress Miriam Margolyes has revealed that she plans to move in with her partner, Heather Sutherland. The pair will be moving in together as she prepares to depart the UK for Italy. Miriam, who previously explained that the secret to their long-lasting relationship was living separately, now says the time is right for her and Heather to live together. Speaking in an interview with The Observer, the Harry Potter actress, 84, said: "The world around us has lost its charm."
Continuing, she added: "And we just want each other in a beautiful place which we know. We can toddle along and laugh and just quietly subside into old age. But together. We're here for such a short time. It's gone so fast. Mentally, I'm still fairly crisp."
Despite being together for close to 60 years, the couple have spent most of that time living separately. "We are together, but we live apart," Miriam previously explained. "She is in Amsterdam, and I am in London but now we want to live together. I really do want to live with her because we are old, and we haven’t got much time left. It is silly to live apart."
The comments come after the actor's various health gripes; however, according to her new interview, these are often blown out of proportion. Miriam underwent a procedure to replace her aortic valve, and has opened up about her struggle with spinal stenosis, arthritis and rheumatism. However, the actor, who has been a vocal advocate for Gaza, says that widespread claims earlier this year claiming she was "close to death" had "angered" her. "They wanted to make out that I was dying," she said in the new interview, "Now, that's deliberate. To stop me selling tickets."
Miriam Margolyes' longtime partner
Miriam's partner is Heather Sutherland, a retired Australian professor of Indonesian studies, who the actress has previously described as a "wonderful, intelligent, ironic, sensitive, observant brilliant woman" during a chat with The Guardian in 2021. The pair first met back in 1967 when they worked together on a BBC radio drama after the former's graduation from the University of Cambridge.
Heather, 82, is a former professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and has published various research papers and books about the history of Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
Sharing her love and appreciation for Heather during an appearance on This Morning back in 2020, Miriam said: "I was lucky enough to find someone who was prepared to love me, I'm not that loveable – I'm smelly and noisy and all that sort of thing. But she loves me and I want to be with her for the rest of my life, that's all I want."