‘The Crown’ Actress Olivia Williams Opens Up About Why She’ll Never Be Cancer-Free

Olivia Williams is opening up about her cancer journey and that she’ll never be cancer-free because of a delayed diagnosis.

The actress, who has starred in The Crown, The Sixth Sense, Dune: Prophecy and The Ghost Writer, among dozens of other projects, got candid in a recent interview with The Times.

Williams recalled visiting 10 doctors over four years, trying to figure out what was causing her symptoms, including aching limbs, fatigue and chronic diarrhea. After she was initially misdiagnosed with lupus and perimenopause, a doctor finally found a rare cancerous tumor in her pancreas.

“If someone had fucking well diagnosed me in the four years I’d been saying I was ill, when they told me I was menopausal or had irritable bowel syndrome or [was] crazy — I used that word advisedly because one doctor referred me for a psychiatric assessment — then one operation possibly could have cleared the whole thing and I could describe myself as cancer-free, which I cannot now ever be,” she said.

Williams, who is advocating for donations for Pancreatic Cancer UK and hoping to raise awareness about the disease, has undergone several procedures to remove the tumor. But as the cancer was discovered so late, it metastasized to her liver, with metastases continuing to pop up, “so we’ve been playing whack-a-mole every time they appear.”

“I go in like a puppy with this optimistic, bright face and then they give me bad news and it’s like, oh my God, I fell for it again,” the Rushmore actress said. “They’ve found new metastases pretty well either just before Christmas or in the middle of a summer holiday. Then, for three years in a row, they started appearing too close to major blood vessels to zap. So there was a period when we were just sitting and watching them grow, which is a horrible feeling.”

Over the course of two years, Williams has been treated four times with Lutathera, which is targeted internal radiotherapy.

“I go to a room in King’s College hospital and people in hazmat suits come in with a lead box of a radioactive material, which they inject into me and I become radioactive,” she said. “It’s supposed to buy me maybe a year, maybe two or three years, of freedom from treatment. In the best-case scenario it would have made [the metastases] disappear but that didn’t happen.”