Joanna Lumley may have turned 80 earlier this month, but she is busier than ever, currently filming the supernatural comedy seriesWednesday for Netflix while reprising the role of Amanda’s outrageously glamorous mother in Amandaland (on BBC One tonight, if your Wednesday evenings needed a little organising).
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, she admitted she’s been saying she’s 80 for the last two or three years ‘because I thought I was, but I wasn’t,’ she says. ‘People are making a big [fuss] about this 80, as if I’m somehow going to be different, as if some huge precipice has been reached.’
While wellness culture often frames ageing as something to fight (see: biohacking and our longevity obsession), Joanna’s approach to health appears pretty low-maintenance: no extreme workouts (‘Don’t be mad!’), rigid diets or elaborate 12-step self-care routines – just decades of moderation, staying active and eating mostly vegetables.
Joanna Lumley with Jennifer Saunders in a 1993 episode of Absolutely Fabulous
In the same interview, Joanna explained that years working as both a model and actor massively shaped her outlook on health and appearance. ‘As an actress, you keep a middling line: don’t get too fat, don’t get too thin, don’t get too anything, don’t be too extreme,’ she said.
The actor, who has been vegetarian for 45 years, described the diet as ‘easy-peasy’, adding: ‘I love animals. I don’t want to kill them, so I never eat meat or fish.’
Joanna has previously spoken about becoming vegetarian in the 1970s being challenging. ‘It was awful to begin with, going out to restaurants and dinner parties, because people didn’t know what to do,’ she said on the Waitrose Dish podcast with Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett. ‘They’d panic and try to make you eight eggs and sort of lasagnes which just turned into huge slabs of concrete with something horrifying in between. There was no way of saying, “Can I just eat the vegetables?”’
While no single eating pattern guarantees healthy ageing, Joanna’s veg-forward philosophy is backed by research, with studies repeatedly linking plant-based diets to improved heart health, lower body weight and reduced risks of chronic disease. Take the EPIC-Oxford study, which assessed tens of thousands of people – it found that, on average, vegans have significantly lower BMIs than meat eaters. Meanwhile, a European meta-analysis involving more than 800,000 people found that vegans and vegetarians had a 15–21% lower risk of cardiovascular disease.
Joanna has also previously credited everyday movement with helping her stay healthy as she’s got older. Rather than relying on punishing workouts or strict fitness regimes, the actor says she prefers staying active through daily life – from gardening and housework to climbing the stairs ‘two at a time’.
‘I look after myself,’ she previously told My Weekly. ‘I don’t go to the gym, but I do stuff with vigour.’
And in an era increasingly dominated by extreme wellness habits and all-or-nothing fitness culture, perhaps that’s exactly why Joanna’s no-nonsense approach to wellbeing feels so refreshing: eat mostly vegetables, keep moving and don’t get too extreme. By her own admission, it’s ‘easy-peasy’.
