Dame Julie Walters has revealed she was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer 18 months ago but has now been given the all-clear.
The “Mamma Mia” actress, 69, tells BBC‘s Victoria Derbyshire how she was diagnosed with the disease after doctors found an abnormality in her intestine following a CT scan.
Walters recalls how she was filming “The Secret Garden” at the time but had to be cut from numerous scenes.
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The star shares, “I was thinking, That’s ridiculous, he must have made a mistake. I couldn’t believe it.”
Walters says how she’d been to see a doctor a year earlier with “slight discomfort,” before returning with more severe symptoms, such as stomach pain and vomiting.
She says of the moment she told her husband Grant Roffey: “I’ll never forget his face. Tears came into his eyes.”
Walters had 30 centimetres taken out of her colon in hospital, and remembers thinking while waiting for the surgery: “Well, I may not come round from the anaesthetic,” despite doctors insisting they could “fix this.”
She says she’s now “really well,” adding: “I’ve just had a scan, and I know that [I’m] clear.”
