Irish actor Olwen Fouéré has revealed her Fair City star husband is gradually dying from a rare neurodegenerative disease. Galwegian Olwen said her partner David Heap (76) — who played Donal Maher in the hit soap for several years — is the victim of a condition called Corticobasal Syndrome. “I think it’s been building for a while,” she told presenter Joe Duffy on RTÉ’s The Meaning Of Life .
“He knew there was something wrong and this particular disease, called Corticobasal Syndrome, it’s a particular type of protein that attacks the brain – so it’s a brain disease and it affects everything. “The symptoms are similar to Parkinson’s. Similar to motor neurone, similar to all, you know, whole spectrum.
And it’s progressive and terminal.” Olwen, who recently starred opposite Jamie Dornan in season two of the popular BBC series The Tourist , admits that David took the news better than she did. “I find it hard to talk about it without crying, and I remember we were in the room with the neurologist, and [when] they said that, I wept,” she recalls.
Olwen with Jamie Dornan in BBC series The Tourist “They were really great because they were telling him and ...
one of the symptoms of the disease is a kind of apathy. It’s a sort of passiveness, which is maybe a blessing. “But he was just kind of taking it all in.
And I started crying. And then when we left, I said to David, ‘you know what they said?’ And he said, ‘yeah, that I’m going to.
