This Life's Nardini Qualifies as Therapist After Years of Loss
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- Daniela Nardini won a Bafta in 1998 for playing Anna Forbes in BBC Two's This Life, which peaked at 3.5 million viewers and is now credited by critics as the prototype for Fleabag; she finally qualified as a therapist in 2024
- Nardini was diagnosed with breast cancer — which had spread to one lymph node — after her first post-50 NHS mammogram, undergoing a mastectomy and reconstruction but no chemotherapy, and she links the diagnosis emotionally to a 'broken heart'
- The cascade of loss also included her father Aldo dying shortly before her 50th birthday, the end of her marriage to restaurateur Ivan Stein, her mother dying in 2022, and the death of her brother Pietro in a car accident when she was a teenager
- Nardini says her panic attacks began at 21 outside her Glasgow drama school and believes they stemmed from unprocessed grief over Pietro's death, leaving her 'numb for several years'
- Nardini also won a Scottish Bafta in 2009 for playing a ruthless estate agent in Annie Griffin's New Town, and says casting directors kept asking her to 'do her again, but in a different way' after This Life was cancelled
- Nardini began retraining as a therapist seven years ago but was repeatedly delayed by lockdown and further family bereavements, and says most of her clients are midlife women who occasionally recognise her from television
Why it matters: Nardini's case illustrates how cultural touchstones of late-90s British TV often end in quiet reinvention rather than sustained fame — a Bafta-winning role in a 3.5-million-viewer show led not to Hollywood but to a Glasgow consulting room serving midlife women. Her reframing of cancer as emotionally connected to accumulated grief, rather than purely biomedical, also gives her therapeutic practice a distinctive philosophical anchor rooted in her own unprocessed losses stretching back to her teens.
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