Olivia Williams has shared that she will never be cancer-free.
The 56-year-old star of The Crown and The Sixth Sense was first diagnosed with a rare type of pancreatic cancer in 2018.
The disease spread throughout her body requiring multiple surgeries and radiotherapy to prolong her lifespan.
“[I’ve] put my house in order,” she told The Times. “That was all done on the gurney as I went in for my first operation years ago.”
After initially turning down the chance to work with Pancreatic Cancer UK, assuming she was not famous enough, Williams is now supporting the charity as London Marathon’s charity of the year.
“It’s too late for me, and for all these people who are running in the marathon who’ve lost a parent or a friend, who could have been saved by a pancreatectomy [removal of the pancreas] if the cancer had been found before it spread,” she continued. “This is where I get emotional but I’m not looking for sympathy, I’m looking for a cheap, early test.”
She is advocating for the test to be embedded into the British healthcare system to encourage early detection. The illness rarely produces serious symptoms until fatal, with one in four people dying within a month of being diagnosed, according to Pancreatic Cancer UK.
Williams visited the doctor approximately 21 times with symptoms before she was diagnosed with the life-threatening illness.
“If someone had f***ing well diagnosed me in the four years I’d been saying I was ill, when they told me I was menopausal or had irritable bowel syndrome or [was] crazy — I used that word advisedly because one doctor referred me for a psychiatric assessment — then one operation possibly could have cleared the whole thing and I could describe myself as cancer-free, which I cannot now ever be.”
The actor says she has dealt with the sickness by “living in a beautiful state of denial”, starring in the National Theatre’s adaptation of Tartuffe, and Sky’s Dune: Prophecy, a TV prequel to the films based on the books by Frank Herbert.
Several celebrities have died of pancreatic cancer including Harry Potter star Alan Rickman, Apple founder and billionaire Steve Jobs, and Dirty Dancing actor Patrick Swayze.
Speaking about her treatment Williams added: “I go in like a puppy with this optimistic, bright face and then they give me bad news and it’s like, oh my God, I fell for it again.”
She is undergoing targeted internal radiotherapy with Lutathera at King’s College hospital. The treatment leaves the star “radioactive”, requiring her to sequester herself at her family’s cottage in the country.
“It’s supposed to buy me maybe a year, maybe two or three years, of freedom from treatment,” she said. “In the best-case scenario it would have made [the metastases] disappear but that didn’t happen.”