NEW YORK — “Game of Thrones” actress Emilia Clarke has revealed she’s had two life-threatening aneurysms, and two brain surgeries, since the show began.

In a first-person story Thursday in The New Yorker, Clarke said she had been healthy all her life when she had the first aneurysm in 2011 at age 24 while working out at a London gym.

An unknown actress before landing the role, Clarke says she had just finished filming her first season as Daenerys Targaryen, the “Mother of Dragons,” on the HBO fantasy series and was suffering from serious stress. She was unable to speak her full name even weeks later.

The second surgery came after Clarke finished shooting the third season. She again feared she might lose cognitive ability even if she survived, but she recovered fully.

“I’d never experienced fear like that – a sense of doom closing in,” Clarke wrote. “I could see my life ahead, and it wasn’t worth living. I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn’t recall my name,” she wrote.

Aneurysms are fatal in about 40 percent of cases and of those who survive, just over 60 percent suffer permanent neurological deficit, according to the Brain Aneurysm Foundation. About 15 percent of people who had a brain aneurysm die before reaching the hospital.


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