Letter To My Younger Self

In an exclusive extract from a new book, celebrities share the advice they’d give their younger selves – love your body as it is, channel your powerful self, and know that bad patches don’t last forever.

Joanna Lumley Actress I’ve always loved getting older, so being 70 is fabulous. I’ve always just felt like me, so the numbers are incidental. You never lose the little you who is within you. We are like trees – we grow more and more circles and more layers as we grow older, but inside us is always the person you were when you were tiny. To be 70 and still working, I’ve been very lucky. Mind you, I’ve also worked jolly hard.

I would tell my younger self that one is powerless until one decides to be powerful – all of us can put on a Batman cape. I’m not a lawyer, nurse, teacher or any of the things that are really useful, but when you are an unskilled person like me but have a kind of fame, you can use it to attract the oxygen of publicity towards something that will make other people’s lives better. That is a great privilege I try to use responsibly.

My happiest day was probably my 12th birthday. It was a lovely spring day in the beautiful hills near Hastings in East Sussex, my parents gave me the pair of flat, cream-coloured sneakers I’d always longed to have and I was in a beautiful dormitory with lots of funny people. I remember thinking, “I’ll remember 12 because this is the best birthday ever.” And I feel like I’m 12 every day - it’s quite wonderful.

Olivia Colman Actress