Beverley Callard has revealed she has been diagnosed with breast cancer, saying she was inspired to speak out by “strong, feisty women”.
Callard, best known for her role as Liz McDonald in Coronation Street, said she is in the “early stages” and will be going ahead with further treatment before returning to the screen.
The seasoned actress is joining the Irish soap opera Fair City as a new character named Lily, long-lost mother of existing character Gwen Connolly.
She told RTE’s Late Late Show on Friday: “I’ve had some tests just before I left the UK, and literally, 15, 20 minutes before I was in my dressing room at Fair City, getting ready to go on, and I was quite nervous and thinking, ‘I hope everybody thinks I’m all right’, whatever.
“And my consultant rang me and said, ‘you’ve got to come back to the UK’.
Beverley Callard is best known for her role as Liz McDonald in Coronation Street Credit: PA
“I said, ‘Well, I can’t possibly, I’ve just taken a new job’. I said ‘I’m away for a month’, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“But I’m fine, I’m absolutely fine. My head was a bit mashed for the first few days.
“It’s very early stages, and I’m along with thousands of other women as well.
“It’s early stages, I travel back to the UK tomorrow, just for a couple of weeks, they’re going to test lymph nodes and lymph glands and all that.
“But then I need an operation and some radiotherapy, and then I’m coming back to Fair City, so I will be back in just a few weeks.”
She added: “I just thought, the world is full of strong, feisty women and I love strong, feisty women, and I just thought, rather than read about it in a newspaper and it all be distorted and everything else, I just said it, so that’s it.”
Callard said she and her husband will be moving to Co Wicklow, adding “we truly love it so much. It’s blowing us away”.
After acting in Corrie from 1989 to 2020, Callard said she was looking forward to her first appearance on Irish soap Fair City, which will hit the screen on February 19.
She said: “I got asked to do it almost a year ago now, and I said, ‘Oh I don’t know if I can do another soap, I don’t know whether I should do that’.
“And they said, ‘well, just have a look at it’.
“In the UK it’s quite difficult to get and so I was watching it on my computer, and I just became addicted to Fair City and I just thought, this is fantastic.
“The editing is so good. The scripts are amazing. Got my husband to have a look at it. And I said, ‘I can’t say no to this’.”
