Coronation Street: Deirdre Barlow to ‘die off screen in heartbreaking new storyline’

On losing her boyfriend, Cory Monteith:

"It's been only a few months, but my mom has experienced a lot of loss in her life and she told me at one point, she said, there is an empowerment that comes with grief, at some point you find it.

"It's very hard but you will find it and I think at a certain point you can choose to sort of fall from this or you can choose to rise.

"And that’s what I'm just trying to do my best for him because I know that that's what he would have wanted, and to just do my best and to you know, hopefully make something positive for where I go in the rest of my life."

On losing his wife, Cassandra Harris:

"I went through it all, very publicly. Such things draw a mark across your heart and it's always a part of your life. To watch someone you love have their life eaten away—bit by bit, by this insidious and horrid disease— becomes an indelible part of your psyche. It certainly did for me."

On losing the father of her child, Heath Ledger:

"Very obviously for me and for [my daughter there's a hole in our life. Of course, the natural inclination is to want to fill it and make it disappear, but what I've come to recently is that it's impossible.

"Nothing will fit in that hole because what we want back, we can't get, which is this one person. I'm not going to rush anything and scamper around like a mad person and make myself crazy.

"I'm trying to be respectful of the absence. I'm not trying to fill it up. It is what it is."

On the stillbirth of her son at seven months:

“I cried for his life, for the hope and joy and expectation that had been taken from us.”

“We called our son Theo. He was nearly 3lbs, which is bigger than some babies in the prem ward.

“Chris and I were very private and we grieved at night. We went to bed and we talked and talked. Chris never cried. I did all the crying.

“When a nurse brushed my hair, I started crying – it was the most tender, loving thing after being bashed around so much."

On losing his wife, Natasha Richardson:

"That's the weird thing about grief. You can't prepare for it. You think you're gonna cry and get it over with. You make those plans, but they never work.

"It hits you in the middle of the night – well, it hits me in the middle of the night.

"I'm out walking. I'm feeling quite content. And it's like suddenly, boom. It's like you've just done that in your chest."

On losing her mother, Marcheline Bertrand: "There are times when I want to talk to my mother about something the children do, and then I realise she is not there… She gave me a great sense of love. I might have been nutty in my youth but I was always loving."

In another interview Jolie revealed that her mother fought through the pain of chemotherapy just to hang on long enough to see that her daughter’s life was on the right course.

"I don't want to get emotional. I wish she were here. I am never going to stop missing her.

"My mom was born to be a grandmother; she would have just loved it. "She did meet some of my children, and she was fantastic. Maddox still remembers everything about her... As soon as Mad came home, I think she knew that everything was going to be all right."

On losing his mother, Princess Diana:

"Initially, there is a sense of profound shock and disbelief that this could ever happen to you. Real grief often does not hit home until much later. For many it is a grief never entirely lost.

"Life is altered as you know it, and not a day goes past without you thinking about the one you have lost.

"I know that over time it is possible to learn to live with what has happened and, with the passing of years, to retain or rediscover cherished memories."

On losing his wife, Linda McCartney:

“[My grief counsellor] was great, particularly in helping me get rid of my guilt [about wishing I'd been] perfect all the time … a real bugger. But then I thought, hang on a minute. We’re just human. That was the beautiful thing about our marriage. We were just a boyfriend and girlfriend having babies.”

On losing his son, Jett Travolta:

"We are working hard on healing, still. It's going to be a lifelong project. Everybody has been so enormously supportive and I really appreciate it."

On losing his mother, Donda West:

“There were times [after her death I would put my life at risk… I didn't have something to live for. Now I have two very special people to live for, a whole family to live for, a whole world to live for."

On losing her father, Jeffrey Port:

"I feel [grief] comes in waves. I worked with my father so I feel like I'm trying to work even harder to do what he would want me to do and to motivate myself and live up to what our goals were.

"Obviously times are hard, but I'm the kind of person who is going to rise above it."

On suffering a miscarriage at five months:

"The whole thing has been a huge journey. There are so many complex stages of bereavement that I’m still going through.

"You feel emptiness, sadness, guilt, loss. I take it one day at a time. One moment you don’t even think about it, the next you’re crying hysterically.

"But it’s complicated, isn’t it? There are moments of total sadness and devastation, and moments of relief too. But you also have to remember that it’s life. Stuff like that happens."

On losing his son, Paul Walker:

"(It's) really tough. It's hard - every now and then I'll really break down.

"Talking really seems to help - remembrances about him. There's just such a tremendous amount of stories.

"There's a lot of hugging, a lot of hand-holding. Just wonderful people coming and telling us how sorry they are."

On losing his mother, Tina Essex:

"Some people think they know what happened but I was there that day and I’m the only one who knows how I coped. I want people to hear it from my mouth once and for all."

Describing the traumatic time when his mother went missing, he said: "I didn’t know where my mum was. I asked Dad: 'Where’s Mummy gone?'

"And he told me: 'She’ll be back soon.’ I didn’t know. I was just a kid. I thought she might’ve gone to a hotel. My dad must’ve been thinking: ‘Where’s my wife gone?‘

After the family discovered Tina had committed suicide, Joey admits he didn't believe his mother was truly gone:

"I remember opening the door and Dad was standing there,’ he said. ‘He picked me up and said: 'Mum’s gone.'

"It was the biggest shock of everyone’s life. But I didn’t really believe it, to be fair. I was upset and crying, but after a while I thought: 'Nah, she’ll come back.'

"For the first five years I never believed it. I’ve never known how she did it, but I knew she killed herself. My sister Frankie knows how but I don’t want to."

On losing his son, Sage Stallone:

"It's tough. It's very very tough. But if you have good friends and your family's support, it's just something that's a horrible situation but ... hopefully it will heal and you try to get through it but it's something that is a reality in life.

"It's important to get back and try to start reliving your life, otherwise you can go into a spiral."

On losing his brother, Andrew Andre:

“It’s like catch-22 – when is the right time to start [back to work]?

“My (other) brother Michael said to me when this situation happens, you don’t get over it, you just get on with it.

“And you do go back to work and you think, ‘What am I doing? Why am I back doing this?’

“But yes (the distraction) really helped me. Yes, you slightly grieve publicly… but you deal with things front on and I’m so glad that the show seems to be doing well.

“And I shouldn’t admit this, but I didn’t see the show – I will see it – but because I’ve lived it, it’s not as easy to watch it.”

On losing his mother, Mardi Arquette:

“It was the first time in my life that my drinking really escalated. I wasn’t dealing with the situation with a clear mind. I was trying to numb my feelings.

“I painted all these spirit-like figures around a glowing heart-shaped light. It was my mother in the middle and all of my family members around her. That was healing. It was the best way for me to cope.”

On suffering a miscarriage:

"I heard the heartbeat, which was the most beautiful music I ever heard in my life. I picked out names. I envisioned what my child would look like... I was feeling very maternal.

"I flew back to New York to get my check up - and no heartbeat. Literally the week before I went to the doctor, everything was fine, but there was no heartbeat.

"I went into the studio and wrote the saddest song I've ever written in my life. And it was actually the first song I wrote for my album. And it was the best form of therapy for me, because it was the saddest thing I've ever been through."

On losing his father, Charles Cooper:

"Death became very real. And very tangible. Because my father - someone who had been in my life for 36 years is just f***ing gone. I watched him dying and I was there by his bed watching him, breathing with him, and then I saw his last breath and he was gone.

"I experienced the whole thing. And that was a watershed moment that I was privileged to experience. And it changed everything.

"My father gave me two gifts - having me and dying with me. I used to be the kid that got the shakes if I had to talk in public; now, I just don't get nervous about stuff.

"I can't control everything. I watched my father die and I realised that is the way we are all going to die. For me, it was a switch from knowing something intellectually to knowing it by tangibly experiencing it. It rewired my neurological system. It almost did the opposite of motivating me.

"It was about keeping the main thing the main thing."

On losing her husband, Edgar Rosenburg:

“I went to New York and a man collecting the garbage would say: ‘Hey Joanie! You’ll get through this.’ People in the grocery store would say: ‘I lit a candle for you last night.’ I thought: ‘My God, the whole city cares.’ People can be a great comfort.”

On suffering a miscarriage:

“Before… this, before what happened to Sam and I happened, I was quite vocal. I complained about a lot of things. I feel incredibly lucky that I was able to grieve with someone I loved.

“There are women who have to deal with this on their own, so even though it was tragic, I knew where I was in the world and the people who were important to me and what mattered, and what didn’t.

“The thing I took away from this was that I couldn’t believe I’d ever complained about anything ever before in my life.”

On losing his son, Conor Clapton:

"A lot of people don't know how to deal with death. It's not something that we're taught in school. I was never taught in school about either relationships, parenting, or life or death, so when I come to see... when I come to the day when I had to go and look at my own son dead, um, in his coffin, I had no, absolutely no preparation for that in any life skill department whatsoever, which I think is a criminal thing.

"First and foremost the most healing experience was for me just to hold my guitar and play and make music. Make music that made... that took me away.

"The key thing that I learnt about life from the death of my son was that we only have this moment. That we don't have tomorrow. Tomorrow doesn't exist and you can... and anything can happen even before the sun sets."

On losing her sister, Bernie Nolan:

"[Bernie] was the strong one for us. When we were down she was like, 'Oh be quiet and get on with it' and that's what has made me come back, because of Bernie.

"I can almost hear her saying, 'What the hell are you doing? Get back out there!' I get my strength, still, from her."

On losing the mother of his children, Jade Goody:

“There were extreme amounts of inconsistency and anger from them both because suddenly they didn’t know what on Earth was going on.

“They didn’t know what they wanted, what they didn’t want, what they could have, what they couldn’t. It was a little bit of everything.

“There were difficulties at school, not necessarily in bad behaviour but some inappropriate stuff. Outpourings of emotion and talking about Mummy being in heaven when other kids in the class didn’t know about those things yet. They were two little boys who were completely lost.

“For all those months they had carried themselves through and it didn’t sink in, then it was like they couldn’t hide it or forget it anymore. So the reaction was massively delayed, and huge.

“Thank God, things are a lot calmer now. Now Mum is talked about a lot, and the boys are even talking about her to their friends which is fantastic progress.”

On losing her mother, Catherine Riley:

“My mum was camp, she was fun, she was the best person, you’d want her to be around all the time,” she says.

“I miss her all the time but I’m not fighting the grief. She’d feel dreadful if she thought I was laid in bed with the duvet over my head crying.

"That’s not the sort of person she was and not the girl she brought up either.”

On losing her father, Emilio Diaz:

"This last year has been the most important of my life. There are things I really relate to now. With death, you learn there are some things you can't change, and that's very poignant for me.

"We should always be grateful for lessons, no matter how painful. They give us our ability to survive."

On losing her husband, Patrick Swayze:

"It's only just recently that I started talking to a grief counsellor. I got sick of hearing myself say the same stuff in my head and to the friends I share with. Depression seems to have become a permanent fixture in my life. Like it's stuck inside me and won't unclog.

"I'll have some wonderful days, and then I'll crash and it feels like nothing has changed at all. I still miss him as terribly as I ever did."

On losing his father, Winston Elba:

“I’m afraid that I’ll probably fall apart (if I give myself time to grieve). He was such a tough man, he would expect me to just to get on with it… I’m human and I realize I should just sit back and contemplate.

“When I call my mum’s house, the answering machine is still my dad and the thing about his lung cancer is it took his voice away as he was going, but the answering machine is his full voice and two things happen (for me). I’m super sad when I hear that, but I’m also really happy that it’s still there, because it’s the only bit of his voice I have…”