Five things you didn’t know about Graham Norton
On Grahan 58 Turns Sunday Norton
Norton was mugged and stabbed by a group of attackers in London, where he was studying drama, in 1989.
“I lost a bit over half my blood,” he said. “It was touch and go.” He was hospitalised for two-and-a-half weeks.
Writing 20 years later, he said: “Horrible, horrible, horrible as it is to contemplate, I was stabbed in the chest, at about 3am in the morning, Friday 8 July. Needless to say, it was a bit of a waking hell... Not wishing to sound melodramatic, but I knew I was dying.”
Norton rose to fame as the over-the-top young priest in Father Ted, appearing in three episodes.
“To be honest I think it’s in retrospect the coolest job I’ve ever had, it's a fabulous feather to have on my cap,” he said in a BBC Radio 4 extended interview.
He noted it didn’t change his career trajectory but he enjoyed it anyway. “It didn’t lead to anything. It came from nowhere and went nowhere. It was just this great thing.” He said that he is “very happy” to have done Father Ted, a sitcom that still “stands up so well”.
Norton dated Kristian Seeber, who performed as the drag queen Tina Burner, in the 2000s. Seeber was competing in the latest season of RuPaul’s Drag Race and spoke in an episode about the difficulties of dating a person as famous as Norton.
“Graham is so famous, he’s at that level where your life is just like put on a platform. He’s such a great guy and it never ever got to him. It was the most amazing thing,” Seeber said on the show.
“I remember people passing judgment on me right away when they don’t even know me: ‘Are you after his money? Are you this? Are you that?’ People want to draw their own opinions.”
Writing in his 2014 memoir, , Graham described their relationship as “a disaster”.
Norton feigned stomach aches and his mother brought him to the doctor, where he continued the pretense.
“We go to the doctor, he’s examining me, I go, ‘ow’, and he said to go and sit in the waiting room. I’m thinking, this is awful, he’s in there now telling my mother there is nothing wrong with me, I’m going to get in such trouble,” he said.
“I come back in and he says, ‘you’ve got something called appendicitis and so you’ll be going into hospital to have your appendix out’.
“Now I’m thinking I’m really fucked because either I have an operation that I don’t need or I tell this doctor that there is nothing wrong with me and I’ve got two very angry adults in the room.” He said he kept the secret for 50 years.
“I honestly, only very recently, confessed this to my mother,” he said.
Norton has spoken about how "work comes first” in his life.
“But because I’ve worked so hard to get where I am, I continue to prioritise my job over other bits of my life. That’s probably very foolish, something I’ll live to regret,” he told the Mirror.
“When I look back at my romantic history, I have to say it’s taken second place to my job. Perhaps I don’t expect my love affairs to last. Or it could just be that I have a low attention span.”