The Mother of Dragons was joined by her mother at Windsor Castle Wednesday, when actor Emilia Clarke and her mother Jenny Clarke were honored by being officially made MBE (Member of the British Order of the Empire) for their charitable work surrounding brain injuries.

The mother-daughter duo founded their organization, SameYou, in 2019, after Emilia survived two life-threatening brain aneurysms in 2011 and then in 2013, both in the midst of her rise to fame as a star of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Alarmed by seeing how understaffed rehabilitation facilities helping patients recover from brain injuries were, and thankful for the actor’s place in what she calls “the minority” of survivors of the medical events with “no repercussions” (she has titanium plates on parts of her skull after surgery to remediate damage), they founded SameYou to raise funds and awareness of brian injury and stroke.

Prince William personally bestowed the MBE insignia to Emilia and Jenny Clarke in the ceremony.

Jenny has also undergone surgery for a brain bleed, Emilia told press at the event.

“It’s such an incredible honor, such an incredible privilege, and the most important thing for us is that it’s for everybody with brain injury,” Emilia said of the award, and how special it was to be honored alongside her mother. “To have this near-death experience and to have gone through the sort of the darkness of it all, and then come out of it, we’re so lucky.”

Emilia Clarke first revealed her brain injuries in a personal essay in the New Yorker in 2019, saying that after her first bleed, she could not speak or even remember her name.

In a 2022 interview with the BBC, she elaborated on her health scares and how unusual her recovery is.

“The amount of my brain that is no longer usable—it’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions,” she said. “I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that.”

When she looks at scans of her brain, she said, “There’s quite a bit missing. Which always makes me laugh…Strokes, basically, as soon as any part of your brain doesn’t get blood for a second, it’s gone. So the blood finds a different route to get around, but then whatever bit is missing is therefore gone.”

Though she has said that she was afraid of losing her job on Thrones after the medical events, she has since learned to accept herself as she is. “I thought, ‘Well, this is who you are. This is the brain that you have.’ So there’s no point in continually wracking your brains about what might not be there.” [Source]