Hair: Mark Hampton.
Make-up: Sarah Reygate.
Nails: Robbie TomkinsSHIRT AND TROUSERS, BOTH MAX MARA. DIGITAL ARTWORK: TOM ELLIST
he results of the biopsy arrive by email.
I am sitting in my trailer in LA, waiting
for the knock to tell me to go to set,
where I am to film an intense farewell
scene with Oscar-winning actor JK Simmons.
He is playing my husband, performing his part
with the kind of restrained delicacy that breaks
your heart. I, meanwhile, have been performing
my role with a squelching sound not unlike a
Wellington boot being pulled out of Thames mud
at low tide. The sound emanates from my stomach
and is picked up by a microphone Sellotaped
to my chest, which catches every whisper – each
decibel amplified and transmitted into the
headphones of studio executives watching
the scene on a bank of monitors 65ft away.
“Sorry everybody. That’s my lunch,” I say.
“Can we go back?” For weeks now, JK has been
a consummate pro and a gentleman. “Happens
to me all the time!” he says. “Are you good to
go? Let’s take that again.”
It is June 2018, and outside, California is Beach
Boys-bright. Back in the trailer, awaiting the
knock, I am plugged into the voice recorder on
my phone repeating my lines when my inbox
pings. I open the email: “It’s malignant, pancreatic
neuroendocrine tumour/cancer. Thank you.”
And then, there is the knock on the trailer door: “We’re
ready for you.”
How do you react to being told you have cancer? Four
months later, I am back home in London re-voicing the
farewell scene, and I see my reaction captured forever on
film. My eyes dart from side to side. My jaw is clenched
like a fist. I speak quite slowly, but I can see my mind is
racing as I listen to JK’s affectionate line. In response, my
mouth breaks into an insane skeletal grin. I turn my face
away from the camera and let out a kind of squawk
somewhere between a puppy being run over and Mongolian
throat singing. Then, I deliver my line.
The bizarre truth is, in that moment, I felt triumphant.
Spike Milligan’s epitaph – “I told you I was ill” – was doing
victory laps in my head. After four long years of doctors
and tests, I’d reached the point where I’d rather be right
and have a diagnosis, than be told yet again that there was
nothing wrong. It was clear many doctors thought I was
delusional. And that is a very lonely place to be.After the first few doctors have turned you away, even the
most supportive friends and family cannot keep you company.
In the consulting room, you are trying to convince everyone
that you are sick. Everywhere else, you’re pretending that
you’re fine. At 3am, knowing something bad was happening
in my body, it didn’t matter whether I was in a flat in London
with my loving husband and two sleeping children, or in a
hotel in Santa Fe making a TV series, I was ultimately alone,
in a bathroom, trying – both literally and metaphorically- not to wake everyone up.
Days were always busy – filled with the work I love, abroad
or at home, with the family, working in theatre, packing lunches
and PE kits, doing admin, seeing friends. But the nights were
an incessant cacophony, like PMQs in my head. Order! Order!
At first, my symptoms – brought on, somewhat absurdly,
by champagne and chocolate – seemed to be comeuppance
for my dilettante tastes. Suddenly, at 46, whenever I consumed
anything high in sugar, an explosion of redness was triggered
on my skin – a deep blush and raised inflammation would
creep up my limbs and neck. >
THE
WAITING
ROOM
Being told that she had a rare
pancreatic cancer was hard for
actor Olivia Williams. Harder
still had been convincing doctors
she was ill. Portrait by Laura
Bailey. Styling by Julia BrenardVIEWPOINT
12-19-FOB-Viewpoint-OliviaWilliams.indd 139 14/10/2019 12:41
139