Stephen Colbert is thanking his wife for saving his life.
The 10-time Emmy winner, 59, suffered a ruptured appendix in November 2023 and was forced to cancel several episodes of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. After he recovered from surgery, he joked about the ordeal. Now, he is revealing that his wife’s intervention was vital to him regaining his health after his medical emergency.
“I was in a lot of pain,” Colbert told Entertainment Tonight in an interview published Monday, January 15. “It was the last show before we took a break. And I went, ‘I’ll just go do the show anyway. I’m sure we’ll be fine.’ By the time the show’s over I had a 102.5 fever. I was in shock. I had blood poisoning.”
Colbert remembered he wanted to go home and sleep. He called his wife, Evelyn McGee-Colbert, on his way from the show to their house, and she immediately knew he needed medical attention. She told his driver to take him to a hospital.
“She heard me, because by the time I was calling her on the drive home, my teeth were chattering and my whole body was in spasms,” Colbert said.
Evelyn, 60, also spoke to ET on the Emmys red carpet, and she remembered she insisted that her husband immediately be treated by a doctor.
“I kept saying, ‘What am I gonna do at home with you?’ No, we need a hospital,” Evelyn recalled. “We need medical care because I can’t take care of that kind of pain.”
Colbert was treated and eventually returned to host his show on December 11.
He has fully recovered and back to joking about the situation.
“Don’t do it, kids,” he quipped. “Don’t broadcast with blood poisoning!”
Colbert was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series and for Outstanding Variety Talk Series. The Late Show lost the writing category to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and The Daily Show WIth Trevor Noah won for best talk show.
Colbert and his wife have been married for more than 30 years. . They have three children together: daughter Madeleine Carlisle, 28, son Peter Colbert, 25 and son John Colbert, 21.
During a Q&A with his live television audience in 2019, Colbert explained that he met Evelyn in their hometown, Charleston, South Carolina, in 1990. He was involved in a serious relationship at the time, and his then-girlfriend gave him an ultimatum — either get married or break up.
Colbert decided to return home to think and make a decision, and he said when he first saw Evelyn, he knew he was destined to be her husband.
“Honest to God, I thought, ‘There’s your wife, you’re going to marry her,'” he told the audience.
