Standing on set at Culzean Castle in Ayrshire earlier this year, Greg Wise was unable to deliver his first line. “I was in full Victorian garb, working on The Buccaneers,” he says. “My first line was ‘You know, I have been so broken,’ and I just started to cry in front of 100 crew members. I said, ‘So sorry, my glorious mother-in-law just died—I haven’t had time to process it.’”
The English actor has been learning to cope with grief for much of his life. In 1993, when Wise was in his 20s, his friend Simon drowned. More than 30 years later, he still feels the loss. “That’s the exquisite thing about grief,” he reflects, “it will find a place to live within you and it shapes your being—and it will bite you on the arse when you least expect it.
Wise was also the primary carer for his sister, Clare, who died from cancer aged 51 a decade ago. He calls the experience of caring for her “an absolute balance of trauma and privilege. We were brought to a place of intense closeness and pure love by those last three months.”
The actor is now an ambassador for the Carers Trust and a patron for the charity End of Life Doula UK. “Every one of us will require care and help,” he says. In Britain, one in 10 people are unpaid carers. The economic value of this labour is almost equivalent to the NHS’s entire budget. “A lot of them are kids, still going to school, looking after a parent… We’ve got to sort ourselves out. It’s disgusting that we’re relying on these angelic figures.”
In his new book, Grief Talking, Wise writes that “loss is the price we pay for life”. “I mainly deal with grief by sitting with it, not hiding from it or belittling it,” he tells me. “The thing I find essential is taking myself away into nature... Walking is a fantastic way of being able to soothe the grief.”
He believes many British people have “lost our relationship to death, to grief and condolence”. In his book, Wise offers practical advice, including that everyone should create a “death box” containing labelled keys, documents and passwords “to get our affairs in order, as an act of kindness for those we love.”
As for how to support others, “The best thing any of us can do for people who are dying or who’ve lost loved ones is to ‘turn up’,” he says. “All we can try to do is approach everything with empathy.”
Born and raised in Newcastle, one of Wise’s early acting jobs was playing John Willoughby in Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, which also starred Emma Thompson, whom he married in 2003. The couple have two children and divide their time between homes in London and Scotland. “Emma and I are very lucky: we’ve had 31 years together now. That’s a great joy,” he says, “Now, both of us are looking at what to do with the chunk of years where the time and energy is running out.”
Aged 60 (“I have my old person’s Oyster card, which I’m loving”), Wise likes seeking out new challenges. “Because we’re all going to die and life is finite, I only want to try to do things that I don’t think I can do,” he says. “It’s one of the reasons I did Strictly Come Dancing, because I can’t bloody dance.”
Just as death can give life meaning, Wise feels that grief is a formative experience. “Until I was able to sit with the pain, I wasn’t able to sit within the joy,” he explains. “That started with being able to be with both my parents while they were dying, and especially with my sister: the gratitude for my life and really understanding the fact that life ends. If we are able to witness and understand that, then all we can do, hopefully, is to live as fulfilled a life as we possibly can.”
Grief Talking by Greg Wise is published by Bluebird
