After making a recovery from a near-fatal superbug infection, the actor has struggled to find work. Now she has started making films herself
‘You see that grey building?” Leslie Ash says. We are standing at the window of her central
London penthouse. “That’s Charing Cross hospital. Now, see that bit sticking out on the left? That was my room, on the top floor.” In 2004, Ash spent nearly three months there, recovering from the superbug methicillin-sensitive staphylococcus aureus (MSSA), a variant of MRSA, perhaps watching her old life out of the window and wondering if she would ever get it back.
She had contracted the infection from a different hospital, the
Chelsea and Westminster – she believes from an epidural needle – after being admitted with cracked ribs, and for weeks it was unclear whether she would walk again. Her husband, the former footballer Lee Chapman, and her two sons, were warned that she might die. It must be strange to have her near-death experience perpetually hovering out of the corner of her eye. “Yes,” she says mildly. “It’s a bit of a shadow in the background there.”