Greg Wise’s emotional tribute to late sister

ACTOR Greg Wise is ready for yet another round of publicity.

But he isn’t promoting a new movie or TV show. Instead he faces the unenviable task of recalling the last months of his sister Clare’s life.

The siblings were “ridiculously close”; living in the same street in London, holidaying together, and enjoying many wonderful family get-togethers.

Film executive Clare was the “rogue aunt” to Greg’s daughter, Gaia, and adopted son, Tindy, with his wife Emma Thompson.

When Clare was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013, Emma went with her to chemotherapy, and together they laughed in the face of cancer, as Clare lost her hair — Emma became stylist, and Greg the hairdresser.

Clare even started a witty blog to keep everyone informed about what was happening with her health.

She was clearly a hugely positive, funny and entertaining person to be around, highly organised (they called her “Clipboard Clare”) and determined to live life to the full.

The treatment worked, but sadly, the cancer returned to her bones in 2015. She restarted the blog, and her brother took it over in July 2016, when she became too ill.

Greg, 51, continued to chart the highs and, increasingly, the lows of his sister’s last months, including the final 10 weeks when he became her sole carer. He was with her when she died in September 2016.

The blog’s now been made into a book, Not That Kind Of Love, but far from being all doom and gloom, there are many light-hearted moments in it.

“You have to approach everything with humanity, and humanity is about humour,” says Greg.

In the blog, he reveals he got Clare absolutely stoned on too many meds and jokes about her beloved cat, Grably Puss, while also filling in details about her new wheelchair, hospital bed and other signs of her deterioration.

He was unable to leave his sister alone towards the end, although he did get some cover to go for some “emotional housekeeping”, aka therapy.

“I go to therapy once a week,” Greg explains. “We should all go to therapy. It’s very important to be able to discuss stuff that is not necessarily appropriate to talk about with mates or family, especially at a time like that, when I was confronting my own mortality and my sister’s.

“I’m intrigued how people are suspicious about folk who go to therapy. It saved my life.

“I could not have sat with my sister and survived, without having done an awful lot of work on my mental health over the years.

“It would have been very easy to have been broken by this. But I wasn’t.”

Greg began filming the second season of The Crown — he played Mountbatten — just two days after Clare’s funeral.

“You’ve got to get on,” he says simply. “Work’s a distraction. It’s very important to take yourself out of where you are in your head to do something pragmatic and physical.

“But there’s no real way of sorting anything out without sitting with the pain and letting it find a place within you.

“Early on, you don’t know when grief’s going to hit you. When it does, it comes like a vomit. You can be walking down the street or at the supermarket at the frozen peas, and suddenly it hits. Don’t get in the way, it has to come out.”

Greg remains convinced that Clare decided when she was going to die.

“I was relieved when it happened,” he admits. “It was untenable for her and had been for a long while. She was finding a reason to open her eyes every morning and I think I was part of that.

“As hard as it was, that period of time was extraordinarily powerful for the two of us in a very positive way.”

Getting back to any kind of normality afterwards was hard, he admits.

“My family were in the thick of it,” he says. “We were all traumatised. We just try to be as gentle as possible.”

Work remains a distraction. Greg’s currently appearing in the BBC4 thriller Modus and is off to LA soon to film a TV series called Strange Angel.

His wife will be filming in New York, so they may meet in the middle. They spend a lot of time apart, he concedes.

“That’s what keeps a marriage healthy and is how it’s always been,” he says.

“We’ve been together for 23 years, and the secret is healthy independence. We just managed to steal four days at the cottage, which was wonderful. It’s about finding these little moments.

“Em and Clare were very close. We holidayed together and when Gaia turned up, Clare was a fantastic ‘rogue aunt’. She was amazing with Tindy.

“Clare’s still very much present and will always be. I carry her with me.”

Not That Kind Of Love by Clare & Greg Wise is published by Quercus, priced £16.99.