Fans hit soap star’s £50k cancer target

FORMER Emmerdale actress Leah Bracknell, right, has thanked fans for their ‘incredible generosity’ after raising £50,000 for her to undergo pioneering lung cancer treatment.

She hit the target after more than 2,000 donations were made on crowdfunding website gofundme in just three days.

The actress, who played Zoe Tate in the ITV series for 16 years until 2005, said she was ‘completely overwhelmed’ by the response, saying: ‘I am so deeply moved and touched and humbled by your incredible generosity.’

Last week the 52-year-old mother-of-two, now a yoga teacher, revealed she had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer out of the blue last month, which she was told was ‘terminal, not curable, not operable’.

She and her partner Jez Hughes set up the campaign so she could undergo cutting-edge immunotherapy treatments in the Hallwang clinic near Stuttgart in Germany which are ‘not yet available on the NHS outside of clinical trials and are very expensive’.