Dame Tracey also told Theroux that she had been concerned that her art would be treated as a joke if she featured in his “When Louis Met…” documentary series in the 1990s.
At the time, she was a headline-grabbing artist whose most notable work was Everyone I Have Ever Slept With And My Bed, which contained the names of all her romantic partners.
During a discussion about the 1997 Turner Prize on Channel 4, she interrupted critics, swearing, and walked out, saying: “I’m leaving now. I want to be with my mum.
“I was really, really in the public eye in those days, really a lot,” she said. “And it was, you know, tabloids, all kinds of things, all the wrong things.
“And you were just going to make it worse for me. That’s what I thought. So I didn’t, but I liked you and I respected, I liked the way you made your programmes and things.
“I thought you were an interesting person, but I didn’t want to do it because a lot of people had an angle against contemporary art then, which I thought was wrong.”
Dame Tracey became a dame in the King’s Birthday Honours list for services to art earlier this year.
She was treated for bladder cancer in 2020 and had a urostomy, meaning she now wears a stoma bag. She also had a complete hysterectomy.
