For the first time in her career, Lone van Roosendaal has an empty work agenda. Although that is not a punishment: the (musical) actress lives in Amsterdam with husband Eric and daughter Puck – eldest daughter Bobbi has already left the house – a houseboat, where it is wonderful to stay. But Lone also needs some rest. Six months ago she disappeared, again, as Billy de Palma from GTST. Lone didn’t think that was a disaster, because she was dead tired. “My father was sick – he had stomach cancer – and I was driving back and forth to Berlin, where he lived. That was quite intensive,’ Lone tells Margriet.
Sterfbed
Her father, who was previously affected by bladder cancer, was spared nothing: after his first chemo he suffered a double TIA, followed by a brain haemorrhage, after which he was in a coma for a month. When he awoke from that, he was ill for another ten months. Lone was not close to her father. She was twelve when her parents divorced. She saw her father only once a year. Lone never blamed him for that. ‘But what I missed afterwards is that someone is working with you, even from a distance. (…) Lone says that her father’s period of illness was ultimately healing for her and her brother, because they noticed that a lot was also there. She found his deathbed very intimate. While she was singing Joni Mitchell’s song River, which she often sang with him as a child, he died. “We cried a lot, but we were also grateful for the months when we could be closer to him than ever,” Lone says in Margriet.
Image: Peter Smulders
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