Joanna Lumley has been a regular on our screens for years after becoming a household name thanks to the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. But, she isn't the only famous person in her family. Read on to find out more about Joanna's son Jamie and their close relationship.
Who is Joanna Lumley's son?
Joanna's son is photographer Jamie Lumley. Having discovered his passion at the young age of six, Jamie went on to study professional photographic practice at the London College of Printing.
Since then, he has frequently travelled around the UK creating products for exhibition, with his work being shown in London, Poland, Paris and Bejing.
Jamie was born in 1967 when Joanna was 21 years old and is her only son. The pair share a very close relationship, with the TV star raising her child as a single mother following her split from Jamie's father, the photographer Michael Claydon.
In a chat with Esther Rantzen on her That's After Life! podcast, Joanna opened up about sending Jamie to boarding school while she was busy with work commitments. She revealed that she had promised to pick him up if he didn't enjoy it but never got his letter pleading for her to rescue him.
"I made a pact with him," she revealed. "I said, "Look, if you hate it, just write to me and say you hate it and I'll come and sweep you away, it doesn't matter at all.'"
"He wrote me letters but I discovered much later that the headmaster had taken all the letters. The boys had to give all their letters to the headmaster before they were sealed up and posted and he was made to rewrite the ones that said, 'Please take me away.'"
"He could never get the message through to me, so I never knew and I could never take him away," she added.
In a different interview with Australian Women's Weekly, the actress revealed that not receiving his letter remains one of her main regrets about his childhood. "That knowledge of that burns me to this day," she admitted. "I love my son. He's the pure gold in my life and to think he was miserable and believed I hadn't fulfilled my promise. It just cuts me to the core."
Joanna Lumley's grandchildren
Jamie, now 56, has two grown-up daughters of his own, Alice, 21, and Emily, 20, whom he shares with his wife Teresa Gibbs.
In an interview with Northern Echo back in 2018, Joanna described it as "absolute heaven" when her beloved granddaughters come to stay with her.
She also revealed that the two girls have had a "crash course" in Absolutely Fabulous, fearing they may find her character Patsy "terrifyingly vile". "My granddaughters haven’t seen Ab Fab before, and my daughter-in-law is putting them through a crash course so they are not too shocked by their grandmother!" she told Good Housekeeping in 2016.