Emilia Clarke's Remarkable Recovery: Missing Brain Parts After Two Aneurysms

Updated 17:34 24 Oct 2026 GMT+1Published 11:04 25 Jan 2025 GMT

The actress told how parts of her skull had been 'replaced with titanium' during the gruelling operations to save her life

Emilia Clarke said it was 'remarkable' that she still had the ability to live a normal life after suffering from two aneurysms.

According to the Game of Thrones star, who celebrated her 40th birthday on Friday (23 October), there is now 'quite a bit missing' from her brain and some parts of it are 'no longer usable'.

Doctors detected aneurysms inside her brain in both 2011 and 2013, at the height of her fame in the HBO series - forcing her to undergo a series of gruelling operations.

Clarke opened up about her terrifying health scare for the first time in 2019, detailing how she 'nearly lost her mind and then her life' in an emotional personal essay for The New Yorker.

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The London-born actress was diagnosed with her first brain aneurysm nearly a decade earlier, after she collapsed during a workout.

Clarke, 40, previously opened up about her terrifying health scares in a personal essay (Annie Raistrick/Getty Images)

According to the NHS, a brain aneurysm is a bulge in a blood vessel in your brain caused by a weakness in the vessel wall - and if it bursts, it can cause fatal internal bleeding.

What began as a 'bad headache' soon resulted in Clarke 'almost crawling' to the changing rooms in agony while she was at the gym, before she blacked out inside of a bathroom stall.

After being assisted by a kind fellow fitness buff and hurried off into an ambulance, she arrived at Whittington Hospital and was informed she had suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH).

Explaining her diagnosis, Clarke said this was a 'life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain'.

"I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture," the Me Before You actress said. "As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon thereafter. For the patients who do survive, urgent treatment is required to seal off the aneurysm, as there is a very high risk of a second, often fatal bleed. If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have urgent surgery. And, even then, there were no guarantees."

The actress shared snaps documenting her recovery (CBS)

She subsequently had a three-hour operation to 'repair her brain', which she described as 'minimally invasive' - but as Clarke said: "This would not be my last surgery, and it would not be the worst."

The screen star thankfully recovered after dealing with a brief bout of aphasia during her recovery, which is a condition caused by damage to the parts of the brain that deal with language.

But her health woes were still not over, as in 2013, Clarke was informed that a smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain which doctors had been monitoring 'had doubled in size'.

The operation to remedy this did not go as smoothly as the first - as the actress explained she woke up 'screaming in pain' and was informed the 'procedure had failed'.

"I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again," she wrote. "This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way - through my skull."

She earned an MBE in 2024 thanks to her inspiring charity work, alongside her mum Jennifer (Andrew Matthews - Pool/Getty Images)

"The operation had to happen immediately," Clarke said, adding that the recovery ended up being 'even more painful than it had been after the first surgery'.

She told how 'bits of her skull had been replaced by titanium' while she was also left fretting that her cognitive or sensory abilities might be impacted.

But miraculously, Clarke made it out on the other side of these 'dark days' and eventually decided to share her experience with fans after finding a new lease of life.

As a result, she no longer shies away from sharing the reality of what enduring two aneurysms is like and recounted how lucky she feels during a sit down on BBC's Sunday Morning in 2022.

She told host Sophie Raworth that she has exceeded expectations of medics, as not everyone who encounters the same health battles as her lives to tell the tale.

"The amount of my brain that is no longer usable... it’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions," Clarke said.

"I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that."

When asked about seeing a scan of her brain, Emilia said: "There’s quite a bit missing, which always makes me laugh.

"Because strokes, basically, as soon as any part of your brain doesn’t get blood for a second, it’s gone. And so the blood finds a different route to get around but then whatever bit it’s missing is therefore gone."

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EMILIA CLARKE WAS WORRIED SHE'D BE FIRED FROM GAME OF THRONES AFTER BRAIN INJURY

Clarke launched the charity SameYou with her mum Jennifer in 2019, which helps those recovering from brain injuries and campaigns to improve access to rehabilitation and long-term recovery support.

As a result, in 2024, the pair were appointed MBEs in the New Year Honours for services to people with brain injuries.

Back in 2019, Clarke shared never-before-seen images of her in hospital following one of the aneurysms while speaking about the difficult road to recovery.

In an interview with CBS, the actress best known for her role as Daenerys Targaryen said: "The first time it was difficult, with the second one I found it much harder to stay optimistic.

Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones (HBO)

"[I coped with it as a] a day to day thing. I definitely went through a period of being... down - putting it mildly," she recalled.

"The second one, there was a bit of my brain that actually died. If a part of your brain doesn't get blood to it for a minute, it will just no longer work. It's like you short circuit. So, I had that."

She went on to describe how her leading role in GOT may just have saved her life, adding: "You go on the set and you play a badass character, and you walk through fire, and you speak to hundreds of people, and you're being asked to be - to work as hard as you possibly can.

"And that became the thing that just saved me from considering my own mortality."

Featured Image Credit: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

Topics: Emilia Clarke, Health, Celebrity News, Game of Thrones