“just about being there and showing up.” — Gabriella Wilde

For actress and death doula Gabriella Wilde, supporting someone who’s dying can mean holding their hand so they don’t have to face it alone. The 37-year-old says the work also means offering calm support to the family through a process they can’t control.

Speaking on This Morning on 14 October 2026, the Poldark actress explained that she began training at night while working on the series, which she appeared in from 2016 to 2019. She initially studied psychotherapy, where an interest in grief led her to explore how people relate to their own mortality.

She became “aware of how little we talk about it,” she said. Wilde believes more open conversations about death and dying can help people and their families feel “less isolated.”

Her training also affected how she approached living. “I found that it not only was changing my understanding of death and dying and grief, but also my relationship with my own life, and how I live, and it became something that really changed me,” she said.

Wilde has also linked her work to the loss of her older sister and a health scare in which she was misdiagnosed with cancer. Recalling her sister’s death, she said: “She was so present in my life it was like, ‘I can’t ring her, and where is she now?’”

“There was a clarity and a simplicity that very quickly set into our life. I was considering very acutely and clearly what matters and what doesn’t, that was quite precious.”

That answer about simply showing up is how she sums up the work itself: being present for a person and a family through something no one can steer.