Clarke – who says she suffered from low blood pressure and migraines as a teenager – made it through the three-hour surgery. However, while she was in hospital, doctors found a second, smaller aneurysm that needed to be carefully monitored. Firmly of the belief that “the show must go on”, Clarke returned to the Game of Thrones set to film season two of the show.

“I was deeply unsure of myself,” she says, thinking back on that period in her life. “I was often so woozy, so weak, that I thought I was going to die. Staying at a hotel in London during a publicity tour, I vividly remember thinking, I can’t keep up or think or breathe, much less try to be charming. I sipped on morphine in between interviews. The pain was there, and the fatigue was like the worst exhaustion I’d ever experienced, multiplied by a million. And, let’s face it, I’m an actor. Vanity comes with the job. I spent way too much time thinking about how I looked. If all this weren’t enough, I seemed to whack my head every time I tried to get in a taxi.”

Doctors eventually told Clarke that she would have to undergo surgery again. This time, though, they were forced to open her skull up for an incredibly painful procedure.

“When they woke me, I was screaming in pain,” she writes. “The procedure had failed. I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again. This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way – through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately.

“The recovery was even more painful than it had been after the first surgery. I looked as though I had been through a war more gruesome than any that Daenerys experienced. I emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head. Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium. These days, you can’t see the scar that curves from my scalp to my ear, but I didn’t know at first that it wouldn’t be visible. And there was, above all, the constant worry about cognitive or sensory losses. Would it be concentration? Memory? Peripheral vision? Now I tell people that what it robbed me of is good taste in men. But, of course, none of this seemed remotely funny at the time.”

Emilia Clarke survived two devastating brain aneurysms – and her attitude is incredible