Julie: I didn’t even tell my daughter about chemotherapy ordeal till I was in remission
‘I didn’t want to upset people’
SHE fought an 18-month cancer battle away from the public eye.
And Dame Julie Walters has now revealed she kept it so secret that she did not even tell her daughter until she was in remission.
The actress, 70, said she couldn’t ‘bear the thought’ of her only child Maisie, 31, knowing what she was going through so told her she was going to have her appendix out.
In fact, the star had two tumours removed from her colon and went through a round of gruelling chemotherapy for bowel cancer before she was given the all-clear.
‘I couldn’t bear the thought of everyone worrying, particularly my daughter,’ she told the Daily Telegraph’s magazine. ‘I told her I needed to have my appendix removed because there was a problem. I couldn’t say the word
“cancer” to her.’ Dame Julie said Maisie simply responded, ‘Okay, mum’. ‘She knew it probably didn’t sound right, but she also knew I wasn’t going to talk about it and she didn’t push me,’ she said.
Maisie herself had cancer as a child, being diagnosed with lymphoblastic leukaemia at the age of two. She was given the all-clear not long after her sixth birthday.
Dame Julie said her husband Grant Roffey, 63, was there as she received her own diagnosis – when she learned she had had cancer for four years – and was her support.
‘I didn’t want to upset people around me. I wanted to keep it small. Of course it was frightening, but Grant was with me every step.
‘I didn’t want to have to talk about it until I’d processed it myself. I still find it a bit hard to be honest.’ She publicly revealed her cancer ordeal in February.