Lumley sisters heal their rift

The sisters began to fight when Joanna Lumley show to fame playing Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous  By Hayley Dixon

12:51AM BST 01 Apr 2013

She is notorious for her campaign to repay a debt of honour she believed her late father owed to the Gurkhas - becoming a figure head for the campaign to give them the right to settle in Britain.

But Lumley has not shared the same fierce bond with other members of her family, and fell out with her elder sister, Aelene, as her own fame soared in the 1990s thanks to Absolutely Fabulous.

The pair have had some very public spats, most notably in 1994 when Lumley appeared on In the Psychiatrist's Chair in 1994 and asked Dr Anthony Clare if he would see her sister Aelene (older by two years) for a private consultation.

Her sister was furious and, in a newspaper interview, she claimed this was the latest in a series of humiliating digs Lumley had had at her over the years.

She even accused her of talking to her family in a stage voice, as though they were fan.

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But the pair seemed to have healed any rift, as Aelene claims: “We are the best of friends now, we are very close. Things have been patched up.”

For her 69th birthday on Good Friday her little sister sent her a present in a brown envelope marked “Not from the Wolf of Wall Street” — a reference to her new film alongside Leonardo DiCaprio - Aelene said.

Tension began building between the two when Lumley won huge acclaim as Patsy in AbFab, and began seeing less and less of her sister. She complained Lumley had “grander and grander friends”.

Then Lumley played a prostitute called Lainie — Aelene’s pet name from childhood — in the ITV series Class Act.

But the suggestion that she see a psychiatrist seemed to be a final straw.

At the time, Aelene announced: “Jo has humiliated me in small ways for a long time. She’s made digs about my looks.

“On one occasion in public she put her elbow on my shoulder and said: “Aren’t you small?”

But now it seems all is forgiven and forgotten, and Aelene told the Daily Mail that she saw her younger sister last month and she often visits her at her remote Suffolk cottage.

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