‘Dune: Prophecy’ Star Shares Why She’ll Never Be ‘Cancer-Free’

English actress Olivia Williams will never be declared “cancer-free.”In 2018, the Dune: Prophecy star was diagnosed with pancreatic VIPoma, a rare type of tumor, but the discovery came too late. Though she had been suffering for years and seeking medical treatment, it took four years for doctors to discover the root of her illness, which had already metastasized to her liver. “Which, as anyone involved in the cancer life knows, is the worst news,” Williams told The Times in a new interview. Related: Oscar-Winning ‘John Wick’ Star Reveals Private Battle With CancerAs a result of the late diagnosis, and despite various treatments, the 56-year-old actress says “the metastases have kept popping up,” forcing Williams and her doctors to keep “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,” she says of the medical roller-coaster ride. “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.”As Julia Llewellyn Smith writes for The Times:“A Harley Street rheumatologist initially diagnosed her with the autoimmune disease lupus, before doctors decided, after a year of treatment, that she was probably simply perimenopausal. Further tests ruled out stomach, bowel or colon cancer before a gastroenterologist in Los Angeles “who was like a dog with a bone, tested for the hormone that this very rare tumor produces and found I had 300 times what I should have had”. She ordered a CT scan that revealed Williams had a 7cm by 4cm tumour in her pancreas, which a biopsy showed was cancerous. “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.”So Williams is doing what she can to make sure others do not face the same problem by raising money and awareness about the disease, and advocating for a simple test that can diagnose those with pancreatic cancer sooner. In the meantime, she jokes that she is “living in a beautiful state of denial.” But one would never know it from her work output. In the past two years alone, you’ve seen her starring in everything from The Crown (playing Camilla Parker Bowles) to Dune: Prophecy and The Wheel of Time. In fact, Williams credits her ability to work with helping her feel better.“It’s a terrible cliché, which every actor is going to roll their eyes at and groan, but that’s the effect of Doctor Theatre,” she says.