ER actress Alex Kingston, who played Dr. Elizabeth Corday on the hit medical drama, was in the middle of a production at an English theater in the summer of 2024 when she got a big sign that all was not well with her body.
“That night on stage, I hemorrhaged,” Kingston said in an interview with The Independent published Friday. “That was really shocking.”
The show called for the actress to wear knee pads and a Tudor dress, so she was able to camouflage the blood.
“I just knocked my knees together and prayed that it would soak everything up,” Kingston said. “The wardrobe women were incredible. I ran off stage and said, ‘Grab me some pads!’ We shoved some pads in my pants and I went back on stage and carried on. That was how we finished the show.”
Kingston, 62, was on ER from 1997 to 2004, beginning in season 4, and she reprised the role in 2009, for its 15th and final season.
She had felt bloated and achy for a while — once even had blood in her urine — but she thought it was part of aging. She finally sought help and was found to have cancer in her fallopian tubes.
“I never went down the cancer road in my head,” said Kingston, who’s also appeared on TV’s Doctor Who and in the movie Alpha Dog. “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.'”
Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank
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So, she underwent treatment.
“I had a major operation,” Kingston said. “I had to have a hysterectomy, I had to go into radiation therapy, and that took up a huge part of my life.”
This year is different, though, because she’s healthy enough to be part of the cast of Strictly Come Dancing, the U.K.’s equivalent to Dancing With the Stars.
“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,” Kingston said.
In fact, she said that, after finishing treatment last year, “I feel like Superwoman.”
