SOPHIE WINKLEMAN
BACKING A CAMPAIGN TO RAISE £1M
ACTRESS WANTS TO MAKE HOSPITALS LESS SCARY PLACES FOR CHILDREN
‘It’s a complete game-changer in the world of very sick children’
Sophie has excelled in playing aristocrats on screen – and her real-life royal husband is Lord Frederick Windsor (together above right), the son of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent
L ady Frederick Windsor knows only too well what frightening places hospitals can be, having spent several weeks in one after suffering serious injuries in a car accident in 2017.
It is one of the reasons why the actress, who is known professionally as Sophie Winkleman, is putting her efforts into a new fundraising campaign for The Children’s Surgery Foundation, of which she is patron.
CALMING FEARS
“No matter how many rainbows and smiley faces they put on the walls, a hospital for a child is a scary place, with lots of unfamiliar faces, strange equipment and words they’ve never heard before,” says Sophie, who explains that every year, more than 250,000 children are treated in the 26 paediatric surgery centres across the UK, almost all of them needing to be injected intravenously during the process. For little patients, this can be both painful and frightening, as she has discovered by talking to their parents.