Julie Walters Reveals She Kept Her Cancer Battle Secret from Daughter: I Didn't Want Her 'Worrying'

Julie Walters is opening up about her decision to keep her daughter in the dark regarding her recent battle with cancer.

The 69-year-old British actress revealed in a new interview with The Daily Telegraph that she did not inform her 31-year-old daughter Maisie when she was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2018.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of everyone worrying, particularly my daughter,” the Mamma Mia! star said.

Walters recalled that at the time, she told Maisie she needed to have her appendix removed because she “couldn’t say the word ‘cancer’ to her.” Maisie simply responded, “Okay, mum,” Walters said.

“She knew it probably didn’t sound right, but she also knew I wasn’t going to talk about it and she didn’t push me,” the actress recalled

Walters said that she “didn’t want to upset people around me,” instead preferring that only a small group of people knew about her diagnosis, including her husband and Maisie’s dad Grant Roffey.

“Of course it was frightening, but Grant was with me every step,” she said. “I didn’t want to have to talk about it until I’d processed it myself. I still find it a bit hard to be honest.”

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The Harry Potter actress urged people to visit their doctors should they be concerned about their symptoms.

“I had some symptoms and not the others,” she said. “My discomfort was really slight. Just go and make sure you get checked.”

According to the American Cancer Society, bowel cancer, which is also known as colorectal cancer, is the third most common cancer among men and women in the U.S., with an estimated 104,610 new cases of the disease projected for 2020.

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In an interview with BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire in February, Walters recalled being shocked over the diagnosis in 2018. During that time, she was filming the upcoming film The Secret Garden, from which she later had to be cut from several scenes.

“I was still thinking, ‘That’s ridiculous, he must have made a mistake’. I couldn’t believe it,” she said of hearing the diagnosis.

Jonathan Prime/Universal Studios

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The actress underwent surgery where she had nearly a foot of her colon removed and revealed she later went through chemotherapy.

The actress is now recovered, saying in the February interview that she “just had a scan and I know that [I’m] clear.”