Actor Jason Watkins – on screen in new show The Game this week (May 12) – previously shared his horror after finding his two-year-old daughter Maude dead in her cot.

Maude died from sepsis on New Year’s Day in 2011, after developing a chest infection.

Picture of Maude Watkins in a photo frame
Little Maude was two years old when she died (Credit: ITV)

Maude’s illness

Jason Watkins and his wife Clara Francis – also parents to Bessie and Gilbert – had taken Maude to A&E after medication given by her GP failed to work. The parents were told she had a bad cold and croup. They were then discharged.

However, Maude died later that night at home. And her parents only discovered that she’d had sepsis after her death.

Sepsis is a life-threatening reaction to an infection that occurs when the immune system overreacts and starts to damage the body’s own tissues and organs.

Jason Watkins looking upset
Jason Watkins discovered his daughter dead in her cot and tried to revive her (Credit: ITV)

Jason Watkins on death of daughter Maude

Last year, Jason spoke about the moment he realised Maude had died. He told Andy Coulson’s podcast Crisis What Crisis? that his other daughter Bessie, who was four at the time, had come into his room.

He said: “I woke up and Bessie came in, she was four at the time. She said: ‘Oh I can’t wake Maude.’ I had this really weird feeling that something was very wrong. And maybe sort of slow-motion started then, getting up and there was a feeling of dread, I remember this feeling of dread, but that everything was going to be alright, you know, it’s fine.

I had this really weird feeling that something was very wrong.

“I walked into the bedroom and I could see the cot ahead of me and I could see that she was, I knew she was dead. She had blood coming out of her nose and her mouth.”

He continued: “Cataclysmic. And then everyone was crying and wailing and it was horrendous. You can’t believe it’s happening, and you want time to go backwards, you think this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening.”

Jason Watkins wearing a suit and glasses on the red carpet
Jason is back on screen in The Game alongside Robson Green tonight (Credit: Cover Images)

‘We couldn’t revive her’

The actor said he tried to revive Maude with CPR on the living room floor, as they waited for the ambulance to arrive.

He added: “You just want time to go back. You think no, this isn’t right, this hasn’t happened, this is wrong. But then the ambulance arrived and they tried to revive her and then we were told by one of the doctors that that was it, we couldn’t revive her and she had died.”