Claire Danes says she freaked out when she found she was pregnant at 44

By Lianne Kolirin, CNN

(CNN) — Claire Danes has said she went into “meltdown” when she discovered she was pregnant with her third child at age 44.

The “Homeland” star revealed that she burst into tears when she found out she and her husband, the actor Hugh Dancy, were expecting their third child.

Speaking to Amy Poehler for her podcast Good Hang, the actress said: “I called my ob-gyn in convulsive tears. It was a pure … it was all meltdown.”

It was not just Danes’ age that made the news a surprise but the fact that she had previously struggled to conceive.

“None of this was by design,” she said, adding that her three children are all five years apart. “I didn’t know it was physically possible — I was 44. And actually Rowan (Danes’ second son) was very hard-earned. I had to do two rounds of IVF. It just was so unlikely.”

Danes, who shot to fame starring opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 “Romeo + Juliet,” told Poehler that she had been at a spa with a close friend, to whom she confided her suspicion that she might be pregnant.

“I wasn’t going to say anything and finally I admitted it,” she told Poehler, saying that she said to her friend: “I totally lost my mind last night and just decided I was pregnant. I went down this crazy rabbit hole and finally looked up what are the odds of naturally conceiving at 44 and they’re like less than 1% one per cent.’ I was like ‘so that obviously is ridiculous.”

In response, her friend revealed that she had had a dream that she herself was pregnant — but was in Danes’ body.

Danes recalled that she had “two strong cocktails” and the following day took a test. “It was like bold, cap lock PREGNANT and I burst into tears,” she said.

“And then this beautiful girl emerged and she’s the best and none of it was up to me and I’m just delighted,” she said.

Although it is not the first time that Danes has spoken of her surprise at becoming pregnant — when she appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in 2023 she said “this one was a surprise” — it is the first time she has revealed her daughter’s name: Shay.

Earlier in her chat with Poehler, Danes said of her daughter, who was born in July 2023: “Shay, my baby, she’s very kind of in her head and dreamy.”

Back in November, in an interview with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the Smartless podcast, Danes said her pregnancy experience was “really interesting.”

She explained: “It was weird — suddenly I felt, like, a funny shame … like I was naughty. Like I had been caught fornicating past the point I was meant to.”

Danes and British actor Dancy first met in 2007 on the set of the romantic drama film “Evening,” and they married in 2009.

She was recently nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in the Netflix series “The Beast in Me.”

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Alli Rosenbloom contributed to this report.