Tony-Award-winning actor Laura Benanti has opened up about experiencing a miscarriage while performing on stage.
On Wednesday (5 April), Benanti shared a photograph taken on board The Broadway Cruise voyage on Wednesday, a cruise ship taking tourists from New York to Bermuda.
In the photo, she can be seen performing in front of a crowd of passengers on an open-air stage on the ship’s deck.
She wrote in the caption that while performing for 2000 people, she was having a miscarriage.
“I know it was happening,” she wrote, adding that this is her third miscarriage and that she has become “no stranger to the pain and emptiness of losing a pregnancy”.
She continued: “If it had been our first loss, or even our second, I likely wouldn’t have been able to go on.”
“It is a path I have walked before, hand in hand with my husband. But this time we walked it alongside some of the kindest, most loving humans I will ever have the honour to share space with,” she said.
Benanti, who has appeared in the Gossip Girl reboot and the Disney Plus comedy Life & Beth, thanked the audience for “lifting me out of my grief” and to her band and crew for working “so hard” to make her as comfortable as possible.
The actor continued to thank those around her, especially her mother and father-in-law, who “shielded” her daughter Ella from the “reality” the experience and “giving her the time of her life while ‘Mama’s back hurt.”.
She continued: “Thank you to that little soul for choosing me as your home, even for a short time.”
Benanti is married to Patrick Brown, with whom she shares two daughters Ella and Louisa.
The pair welcomed baby Louisa in July via a surrogate.
“Patrick and I are so grateful for the family that we have, and the miracle of our two little girls. One carried by me and one carried by an angel-on-earth,” she wrote of her family.
She added that she and Patrick “are heartbroken” but reminded others who have experienced a pregnancy loss that they are “not alone.’”
“I share all of this, not to garner sympathy or attention, but to remind the many people and families who have and will suffer in this way that there is no shame in this kind of loss. That you are not alone. And to remind myself as well,” she concluded.
