Alex is one of the favourites to win the annual BBC dancing competition
Alex Kingston on Strictly spin-off It Takes Two(Image: BBC)
Strictly Come Dancing star Alex Kingston has said she feels ‘fearless’ in a health update after recently sharing her cancer diagnosis.
The Doctor Who and ER star is currently competing on the annual BBC dancing competition with fan favourite professional dancer Johannes Radebe. Consistently among the top scorers of the week, the pair are one of the favourites to lift the Glitterball trophy.
Last month saw Alex reveal she was diagnosed with uterine cancer last year after she experienced a haemorrhage on stage during a performance at the Chichester Festival.
She previously told The Independent newspaper: “I had a major operation. I had to have a hysterectomy, I had to go into radiation therapy, and that took up a huge part of my life… I had assumed that the way I was feeling was old age, and I just sort of accepted it. 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. I never went down the cancer road in my head. 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’.”
Alex waited until her run in the play was over before seeking medical treatment and she was told doctors found cancer in her fallopian tubes but it hadn’t spread to her ovaries. After undergoing the hysterectomy and a course of radiation therapy, Alex said she feels better than she has in years and noted that ‘any cancer is really tough to accept’.
“The minute I had the operation, I suddenly felt like myself again … [I] hadn’t felt like that for years,” she noted.
Strictly Come Dancing’s Alex Kingston and Johannes Radebe(Image: BBC)
Preparing to return to the dancefloor for Strictly’s annual live edition from Blackpool’s Tower Ballroom, Alex has now revealed her hopes that her going public with her diagnosis will inspire others.
She told The Mirror: “It has made me fearless. Well, at the moment I’m terrified for Saturday! But it’s made me want to encourage people to just go for it. I do hope to help others by speaking out about what I have gone through.
“I hadn’t made it public, and I just thought, ‘I’m going to because I haven’t been voted off yet!’ I’m showing people that I’m taking this journey forward and I just want people to know that if they’ve gone through something, and it doesn’t even necessarily have to be a health issue, even the loss of a parent – because that happened to me at the same time – anything like that, it is a reminder to just live, and live to your fullest.
“Just take every moment you have and enjoy it because you’ve only got this one chance, as far as you know.”
After her Paso Doble saw her slip to the bottom of the leaderboard, Alex was left elated last weekend when she and Johannes’ Waltz saw them return to form and climb to third place in the rankings.
“It was really important to me this dance. I psychologically needed to put the week before aside and I needed to be able to get on that dance floor and enjoy a dance and come through it. Just get all the cobwebs of doubt out of my system.
“So it was massively important. We just said to each other before, ‘it’s just you and me on the floor, this is for us’. It was wonderful to just have that experience and to get over the doubts,” she noted.
Asked about the importance of Blackpool week, Alex stated: “The whole Blackpool experience for me has been kind of rather abstract until now. We had a chance to do a big group number rehearsal and my goodness I came away from that day so excited because there are 47 people on the dance floor and we’re all doing the same dance number. It’s just beyond exciting!”
