Actress Alex Kingston, known for roles on “ER” and “Doctor Who,” has revealed she was diagnosed with uterine cancer last year.
In an interview with The Independent, published Friday, the 62-year-old opened up about the hysterectomy she underwent and the radiation therapy she completed after.
“I had assumed that the way I was feeling was old age, and I just sort of accepted it,” she told the outlet. “I thought, ‘OK, this is what it’s like to be in my sixties.’ But a lot of how I was feeling was to do with my illness.”
Kingston — currently competing on “Strictly Come Dancing,” the U.K. version of “Dancing With the Stars” — shared that she’d been experiencing bloating and aches for a while before seeking medical attention after spotting blood in her urine.
“I never went down the cancer road in my head,” the London native confessed, adding: “It was a shock, because I have a very positive outlook on life in general. Even though my body was telling me there was something very seriously wrong, I kept thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got a bad UTI or fibroids.’”
Doctors eventually determined she had cancer in her fallopian tubes, but that it hadn’t spread to her ovaries.
Kingston also revealed that she experienced a hemorrhage while performing onstage in “The Other Boleyn Girl” at England’s Chichester Festival Theatre last year.
“That was really shocking,” she said, noting that her ornate Tudor-period costume with knee pads helped spare her from public humiliation.
“I just knocked my knees together and prayed that it would soak everything up,” she said.
After running offstage, the wardrobe women helped Kingston “shove some pads” in her pants and she went back onstage as if nothing had happened.
“That was how we finished the show,” she said.
According to Kingston, the year of 2024 was consumed by her health ordeal.
“Despite having gone through all of that — and any cancer is really tough to accept, to steel yourself to go through all of the necessary procedures to get back into health — the minute I had the operation, I suddenly felt like myself again,” the mother of one said.
