....... Talking to Nina Myskow for her new Too Late To Die Young podcast, he also opens up about losing important people in his life, including his older sister Angela to suicide in 1987.
“She was early 50s,” he recalls. “She suffered from very deep depression, so it wasn’t a total surprise. It was still shocking, but what it left me with was desperately trying to understand how depression could be that deep.
“She was married happily, had three very lovely children who’ve all been very successful, she was funny and attractive. She had everything going for her.
“Yet there was something there so dark, intense and fierce that it dragged her down. That, I can’t understand.”
He had seen Angela play tennis with his wife Helen the day before she died.
It is a day Sir Michael thinks about often. “It was hard to deal with, you start to think about if there were any way you could have prevented it,” he says.
“So I kept thinking, could we have just said something to stop her? The answer is absolutely not. It’s a physical disease.
“Anyone who says, ‘Just pull yourself together’, that’s just not the way it is.”
Two years later, Sir Michael suffered the deaths of mum Mary, fellow Python Graham Chapman and a very good pal.
“Within three months, that was very hard to deal with,” he says. “If you die of old age like my mother did, I was actually quite glad when she eventually died.
“She was very unhappy for the last two to three months of her life. She was in pain and quite uncomfortable. She was 86.
“With Graham, that was a terrific loss as Graham was only 48 and, dear old Gray, worked himself quite hard and drank and smoked a lot. He had given all that up and was just approaching middle age, when he was wise and loving and funny, and then it suddenly catches up with him, the past.
“That was very hard to deal with. Sadly, he drank himself to death.”
He continues: “Some of the most wonderful moments I can remember with him are after he’d had a drink or two. He was genuinely eccentric.
Another Python sadly lost, though not gone, is Terry Jones, 76, who has frontotemporal dementia. “He has lost the power of speech, so it means you can’t really have a conversation with him,” says Sir Michael.
“But I still talk to him and I see him react sometimes. Other times he will just drift off. It’s just a form of dementia, you’re slowly retreating. So it’s all the more important to go and see him and to be recognised by Terry.
“He smiles as he sees you. That’s terrific. He doesn’t talk, I talk, but that moment of recognition or a hand on my arm, or a squeeze, that’s important.
“But I suppose things like that will become fewer and fewer, which is sad.”
Courtesy of Neville C. Bardoliwalla OBE