'My body was trying to tell me': Actress Alex Kingston opens up on on her cancer diagnosis
Actress Alex Kingston has said she "wasn't reading the signs" from her body before she was diagnosed with uterine cancer.
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The Doctor Who and ER star, 62, revealed last year that she had had a hysterectomy and radiation therapy.
She told Prima magazine: "I hadn't realised that uterine cancer was a cancer that didn't get much airtime.
"I think it's probably because on the whole, it is a cancer where if you recognise something is wrong, your body is able to tell you. And if it's caught early enough, it is survivable."
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She added: "Because I'm such a positive person, even though my body was trying to tell me that something was very wrong, I wasn't reading the signs.
"I thought that all the things such as the bloating and weight gain, or injuries not healing properly, were because of my age.
"I thought, 'This is what it's like to be in your 60s, and it's just part and parcel of getting older'.
"It was only when I was doing a play and I started haemorrhaging on stage that I realised, 'Oh there's something going on'.
"But even then, I thought maybe I'd got a burst fibroid. I never, ever went down the cancer road, so it was a shock."
The actress revealed her diagnosis while she was a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing. However, she said she was initially reluctant to speak about it, telling the magazine: "I kept it quiet for a long time. I'm quite a private person and I felt, 'Why should I talk about my cancer?' and also on Strictly, I thought 'I don't want my journey to be about my sickness'.
"I wanted it to be about going forwards and life affirmation. But then I realised when I started to get responses from people that, actually, this is important.
"If nothing else, it's important to encourage people that if their body is behaving in a slightly unusual way, don't just write it off as being old or suddenly becoming gluten intolerant.
"It could be something else and to go and have it checked. So I feel now that it was a good thing that I opened up about it."
The April 2026 issue of Prima is now on sale.