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Coronation Street star Beverley Callard has revealed that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer.
The 68-year-old, who played Rovers Return barmaid Liz McDonald for three decades on the North West soap, told RTE’s Late Late Show on Friday (6 February) that the illness is in its “very early stages”.
She told the show’s host Patrick Kielty that she is set to undergo further testing before having “an operation and some radiotherapy”.
Callard, who has recently joined the cast of Irish soap Fair City, said she received the news from her doctor in a phone call just minutes before she was set to start filming.
“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,” she said.
“And I was quite nervous and thinking, ‘I hope everybody thinks I’m all right’, whatever.
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Callard said that the illness is in its ‘very early stages’ (PA)
“And my consultant rang me and said, ‘you’ve got to come back to the UK.’”
“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.”
She added that she will “travel back to the UK tomorrow, just for a couple of weeks”, where her doctors are “going to test lymph nodes and lymph glands”.
“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 said.
Callard told fans that she is feeling “absolutely fine” but admitted that her “head was a bit mashed for the first few days” after receiving the diagnosis.
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The star left ‘Coronation Street’ in 2020 after three decades on the cobbles (PA)
The actor joined Coronation Street in 1989 and eventually left the soap in 2020.
She has also appeared in the Noughties comedy Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and has served as a panellist on Loose Women.
She took part in I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2020.
It is estimated that one in seven women in the UK will develop breast cancer during their lifetime.
