Sophie Winkleman "expected" to die when she was involved in a car crash last November.
The 37-year-old actress – who is titled Lady Frederick Windsor -was travelling from the set of upcoming new drama ‘Trust’ when the car she was travelling in was hit by another vehicle and thrown up in the air, causing broken bones in her spine, a fractured foot and ruptured abdomen, and the former ‘Peep Show’ star didn’t think she’d make it out alive.
She said: "It’s very strange, when something huge happens to your body, you don’t immediately feel the pain.
"I felt lots of warmth and a strange kind of serenity. I felt like my soul was rising up and seeing everything… Yes, I did expect to die. It was extraordinary…
"This sounds so bizarre but there was a strange,tinkling music in my mind, like wind chimes, and I thought it meant I was dying.
"Even though I was lucid and I could hear the screaming, the car alarms and sirens, and I saw the lights in the road suddenly get very red, there was a strange aura – like my soul was rising up and seeing everything.
"I became curiously detached from the car and the scene."
In what she thought were her final moments, Sophie – who has daughters Maud, four, and Isabella, two, with husband Lord Frederick Windsor – prayed for the future happiness of her family.
She continued in an interview with Britain’s HELLO! magazine: "I thought about my girls, my mother and father and poor Freddie.
"I thought if I die right now, I must make sure my prayers are practical, like, ‘Please let Freddie find a nice lady to be very sweet to the girls, please make my mum and dad’s health OK so they can be very involved in the girls’ lives’, things like that.
"But then gradually the strange aura became less and less and I was suddenly lying outside on the road as a man talked to me and I then thought I might survive."
Sophie was taken to nearby Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge and spent the night worrying she wouldn’t walk again as she had no feeling in her legs.
She recalled: "I think I started to go slightly mad around 2.30am, taking bottles of water, anything from beside my bed, and smashing them against my legs, desperate to feel something. But I couldn’t."
After three days, Sophie began to get movement back in her toes and after two weeks, she was transferred to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, where she finally walked again.
The ‘Two and a Half Men’ actress left hospital on Christmas Eve (24.12.17) and though she still has days where she’s in pain, she’s expected to make a full recovery.
She said: "I can have really good days and then I can have rather creaky days.
"A bad back does make you feel old – turning over in bed is rather an Everestian task.
"But I’m about to start a course of Pilates which I’ve been told should help a lot.
"And the prognosis is to make a full recovery – I’m very lucky."
Sophie Winkleman feared she’d die in crash
