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Graham Norton recalled losing “half the blood” in his body after a group of boys mugged, stabbed and left him for dead in his drama school days – but he thinks the episode helped him put life into “perspective”.
“The positive of it was… it just put everything into perspective,” he mused in a new interview.
“[I] was going into the third year of drama school and] they were doing the castings for the third-year shows; there were a lot of people crying and running into toilets and slamming doors. [On the other hand], I was just sitting there going, ‘I’m alive. I’m good. I’m golden.’ So, in a way, it kind of changed my life for the better!” he exclaimed to the Telegraph.
The 60-year-old is now able to look back stoically on the event, even though, to add insult to injury, his boyfriend had dumped him the very next day. “Not only did I lose half my blood but I lost my boyfriend too,” he groaned, describing the decision to break up within hours of the attack as “not the most tactful piece of timing”.
The star also recalled the terrifying moment he’d asked a nurse whether he was going to die as a result of the attack – and she struggled to answer straight away. “She went, ‘Eerrrrm…’ and I was like, ‘Don’t pause. This is not the place to pause. This is quite serious,’” the frantic star recalled.
She had approached him to ask whether he wanted his parents to be informed that he was in the hospital – and he had decided that depended on the severity of his injuries. “In my head, I was thinking, ‘Well, I don’t want to worry my parents but equally, if I’m going to die, they’d probably like to come and say goodbye to me, because they’d be annoyed if I didn’t tell them,’” he reasoned.
Graham recovered – but a few years later, potential disaster struck again.
He was outside a nightclub when someone brandishing a knife approached him on the lookout for money, but Graham said he’d been safe as others were around at the time.
“What’s so sad about the knife crime now is that everyone is a victim in the end,” he previously told The Mirror.
Graham hasn’t been afraid to return to the original site where he was stabbed, after he was asked years later to go there to film a Christmas advert for the BBC.
Any residual trauma he might feel when confronted with the location doesn’t matter to him, as he’s now moved on and enjoys a glittering showbiz career.
These days, life is looking up for Graham, who is now happily married to filmmaker husband Jonathan McLeod, following their 2022 wedding in Ireland.
He previously confided that he felt he was from “that generation of gays” who’d thought marriage was never going to happen.
However, he joked to the Guardian about the pair’s senior citizen status: “‘Till death do us part’ seems more achievable at our age.
“If you get married at 23, that’s a big ask [but] we only have to put up with each other for a couple of decades, and then I’ll be out of here!”
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Source: NewsFinale
