Emilia Clarke is made an MBE for co-founding brain injury charity with her mother after surviving two haemorrhages

By Sean O'grady For Mailonline 13:46 21 Feb 2024, updated 17:06 21 Feb 2024

Emilia Clarke has been made an MBE alongside her mother Jenny for their work establishing a brain injury charity.

The Game Of Thrones star, 37, beamed from ear to ear as she accepted her honours at Windsor Castle on Wednesday.  

Emily and her mother co-founded SameYou, a brain injury recovery charity they established after the actress survived two brain haemorrhages.

The first, a bleed on the brain, happened while she was working out in a north London gym in 2011.

She founded the charity after she was shocked to find out how understaffed rehabilitation services were.

Emilia first had a bleed on her brain in 2011, just after the first series of Game Of Thrones had finished filming, and she lost her ability to speak as she almost slipped into a coma.

Her second bleed in 2013 needed surgery after scans showed it had doubled in size, and Emilia has previously told how she was in the 'really small minority' of people who have survived and been left with 'no repercussions'.

She suffered the subarachnoid haemorrhage after an aneurysm – a weak area in a blood vessel – on the surface of her brain burst.

They are most common in people aged between 45 and 70 and can leave patients with extreme tiredness, problems sleeping, headaches, vision disturbances and loss of movement, but Emilia previously said she has been left unaffected,

The experience prompted Emilia and her mother Jennifer to set up charity SameYou to raise funds and help increase neuro-rehabilitation access after brain injury and stroke.

Emilia has discussed having surgery to restore blood flow, as well as medication to relieve the pain. 

Her life-saving treatment has left her with titanium in place of sections of her skull and scarring.

The star has previously admitting she was 'more afraid of being fired than dying'.

She told Harper's Bazaar: 'I wasn't afraid of dying. I was afraid of being fired! I decided: ''This is not something that's going to define me''. I never gave into any feeling of 'Why me? This sucks'. I was just like – gotta get back on it.

'If I'm being brutally honest, the whole thing made me feel very ashamed. Like I was broken. As though the producers must think I'm an unreliable person that they've hired.

'If I hadn't had a brain haemorrhage, I might have turned into a right old d**khead, thinking I was the bee's knees, living in Hollywood. I'm so much more aware of what's happening, in the moment that it's happening.

'I don't worry about failure – I thrive on failure! If something goes wrong, I always think you can fix it. It hurts, it's scary, but then you can do anything.'

In July 2022, Emilia explained how she should not be able to speak after two aneurysms left sections of her brain 'no longer usable'.

She told Sophie Raworth on BBC1's Sunday Morning: 'You gain a lot of perspective. The amount of my brain that is no longer usable... There's quite a bit missing which always makes me laugh.'

Emilia said it was 'life-enhancing and magical' to see her mother, who has also had surgery to remove a brain aneurysm, recognised for her charity work alongside her.

She said: 'It's such an incredible honour, such an incredible privilege, and the most important thing for us is that it's for everybody with brain injury.

'To have this near-death experience and to have gone through the sort of the darkness of it all, and then come out of it, we're so lucky.'

Other people who will be recognised at the investiture ceremony include Labour MP Dame Siobhain McDonagh, for political and public service; director Betsy Gregory, for services to dance; and Lydia Otter, for services to people with autism and their families in Oxfordshire.