Speaking to Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby on This Morning, the 50-year-old actress, who is best known for playing Ronnie Mitchell in EastEnders, noted that she was “lucky” to have caught the disease early.
“I’m really good. I was diagnosed three, four months ago with breast cancer. It was really incredible because I didn’t find a lump, I didn’t feel unwell. There had been a lot of illness around our friends and family and I just thought I’d get a random check and I had an ultrasound, and it showed a little shadow – at that point it could be anything, a cyst… then I had further investigations and then that diagnosis.
“I was lucky, it was less than two centimetres. I had a lumpectomy, which is just a piece of tissue removed and five lymph nodes.
“The mad thing about cancer, when you have it, you understand there are so many different roads, different diagnoses, it is a terrifying world. It’s terrifying at the beginning but if there was ever a time to have it, there are so many new treatments now that are changing the face of cancer, it’s amazing.”
Samantha announced her diagnosis on social media posting a picture of Olivia Newton John following her passing in August. She shared with Phillip and Holly her reasons for making the announcement that way.
“I always had quite a precarious relationship with what you share on social media but also challenging yourself, thinking, ‘Am I doing this because I want likes or am I doing this because there’s actual genuine intention behind it?’
“So at the beginning, I was like, ‘I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do’ and then Lily, my daughter was in the kitchen with Ollie [Samantha’s partner] cooking and she read about Olivia Newton John, and she was on her phone. She just read it in the kitchen and I’d been with Olivia, just for a dinner after a show I’d done, I’d played Sandy in Grease.
“It was just at the beginning of her diagnosis and what struck me was her journey had been 30 years and she was at the end and I was just at the beginning, and it took me back – I felt very moved by it… I thought, ‘I want to share it. I want to talk to people. I want to put it out there’ and it was amazing, the love that came back. I felt empowered by it.”
Samantha was forced to take a break from her role as the Ice Queen in a West End production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe due to the illness, but is now back performing.
“I think its my Nordic, Viking genes that helped get me back in quite soon after the surgery,” she told Phillip and Holly.
This Morning airs weekdays at 10am on ITV
