Laura Benanti, the Tony Award-winning stage and screen actress, performed a concert for about 2,000 people on a cruise ship despite being in the middle of having a miscarriage, she wrote in a post on Instagram.
“If it had been our first loss, or even our second, I likely wouldn’t have been able to go on,” she wrote in the post on Wednesday. “But unfortunately, I am not a stranger to the pain and emptiness of losing a pregnancy. It is a path I have walked before, hand in hand with my husband.”
Benanti, who has performed on Broadway since the late 1990s and won a Tony for a featured role in “Gypsy,” was aboard a Broadway-themed cruise coming back to New York from Bermuda, where she had planned to perform songs from musicals she had appeared in, including “The Sound of Music,” “She Loves Me” and “My Fair Lady.” She realized on Sunday that she was having the miscarriage, she wrote, but decided to go onstage the next day.
Benanti has two children with her husband, Patrick Brown.
“My husband and I are heartbroken but we will move through this together as we, and so many others, have done before,” she wrote in the post. “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.”
