“If someone had f—ing well diagnosed me in the four years I’d been saying I was ill … then one operation possibly could have cleared the whole thing.”

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at Entertainment Weekly. He began writing for EW in 2022.

Olivia Williams says she’ll never be cancer-free.

The English actress, perhaps best known for playing Camilla Parker Bowles on The Crown and Bruce Willis’ onscreen wife in The Sixth Sense, has shared harrowing details about her cancer journey in a new interview.

Williams explained that after experiencing prolonged fatigue, chronic diarrhea, and limb aches, she was first misdiagnosed with lupus and perimenopause. It took four years and 10 doctors to finally discover a cancerous tumor in her pancreas in 2018.

Leon Bennett/WireImage

The actress told the U.K.’s The Times, “If someone had f—ing 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 added that she went on “about 21” doctor visits before she was correctly diagnosed.

Olivia Williams on ‘The Crown’ season 5.Netflix

Williams, who has also appeared in projects like Rushmore and the HBO series Dune: Prophecy, said that despite that initial tumor’s eventual removal, she still has to combat new metastases. “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,’” Williams said.

“They’ve found new metastases pretty well either just before Christmas or in the middle of a summer holiday,” she continued. “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.”

Williams has also undergone four rounds of Lutathera, which is a targeted internal form of 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 explained. “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.”

Bruce Willis and Olivia Williams in 1999’s ‘The Sixth Sense’.Buena Vista Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

The actress is now advocating for donations for Pancreatic Cancer UK so that new testing methods can transform diagnoses.

“I’m not looking for sympathy — I’m looking for a cheap, early test,” she said. “Because [pancreatic cancer is] so quick and so shocking, people tend to liken losing someone to this cancer to losing them in a car crash. What could change that is early detection with a test that could be as simple as breathing into a bag at your GP. We’re incredibly close — we just need to get it over the line.”