The Crown actress Olivia Williams revealed that she will never be “cancer-free” after a rare tumor was repeatedly misdiagnosed.
“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,” Williams, 56, told The Times of London in an interview published on Saturday, April 19.
In her new interview, Williams recalled enduring a myriad of physical symptoms — from aching limbs to chronic diarrhoea — as she visited doctors in three countries over a four-year period. Her physicians initially suspected the autoimmune disease lupus or that she was perimenopausal, but both were ruled out after significant testing.
Finally, a U.K. rheumatologist discovered Williams had a cancerous VIPoma tumour in her pancreas after testing for a hormone that the VIPoma produces. She has since been treated four times with targeted internal radiotherapy, after which she must live in “complete isolation” for two weeks to avoid exposing others to radiation.
“It’s supposed to buy me maybe a year, maybe two or three years, of freedom from treatment,” she said of the treatment. “In the best-case scenario it would have made [the metastases] disappear but that didn’t happen.”
Williams also underwent multiple operations to remove the tumour from her pancreas, but because of late detection, it metastasized to her liver. She now takes medication and undergoes regular scans.
“I go in like a puppy [to the doctor] 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 said. “They’ve found new metastases pretty well either just before Christmas or in the middle of a summer holiday. Then, for three years in a row, they started appearing too close to major blood vessels to zap. So there was a period when we were just sitting and watching them grow, which is a horrible feeling.”
Williams reflected on what it could have meant for doctors to identify her VIPoma tumour earlier and how her misdiagnoses convinced her to advocate for “early detection” for others.
“It takes an average person with my cancer a VIPoma tumor 11 visits to the GP to be diagnosed. For me it was probably about 21 times,” she noted.
Williams insisted that she was not “looking for sympathy,” rather she was speaking up in hopes of “a cheap, early test” being made more readily available.
The acclaimed stage and screen actress shares two daughters — Esmé Ruby, 21, and Roxana May, 18 — with actor and comedian Rhashan Stone, whom she married in 2003. While the star continues treatment for pancreatic cancer, she said she has made arrangements for the worst-case scenario.
“[I’ve] put my house in order,” she said. “That was all done on the gurney as I went in for my first operation years ago. I was already ringing my American accountant to give Rhashan access to my US dollar account. I have a very dear friend, Natascha McElhone, whose husband [Martin Hirigoyen Kelly] died very suddenly [in 1998]. She was an extraordinary cautionary tale for all of us about getting your affairs in line because you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Williams, who is a patron of Pancreatic Cancer UK, has an extensive 33-year career on stage and screen, including playing Camilla Parker Bowles in the final two seasons of Netflix’s The Crown. She also appeared in two episodes of Friends as Felicity, a bridesmaid at Ross and Emily’s wedding who hit on Joey.
