'ER' Star Alex Kingston Reveals 'Shock' Womb Cancer Diagnosis Following Scary On-Stage Hemorrhage

Alex Kingston, famed for her role as Dr. Elizabeth Corday in the long-running medical drama ER, is speaking out about her health for the first time since she revealed her womb cancer diagnosis last year.

“I had assumed that the way I was feeling was old age, and I just sort of accepted it. I thought, ‘OK, this is what it’s like to be in my 60s,’” Kingston, 62, began in an interview with a news outlet on Friday, October 10.

The actress explained she had experienced bloating and achy pains for the last few years, but only sought medical attention in 2024 after noticing blood in her urine.

“A lot of how I was feeling was to do with my illness. I never went down the cancer road in my head,” she revealed. “It was a shock, because I have a very positive outlook on life in general. Even though my body was telling me there was something very seriously wrong, I kept thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got a bad UTI or fibroids.’”

Kingston recounted a traumatic moment while performing in The Other Boleyn Girl at the Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex, England, last spring, when she suffered a hemorrhage on stage and had to use her Tudor-period costume to conceal it.

“That was really shocking. I just knocked my knees together and prayed that it would soak everything up,” she recalled of the incident. “The wardrobe women were incredible. I ran offstage and said, ‘Grab me some pads!’ We shoved some pads in my pants and I went back on stage and carried on. That was how we finished the show.”

Kingston spent the rest of the year seeking treatment, as the cancer in her fallopian tubes had not yet spread to her ovaries. She concluded the treatment at the end of 2024.

“I had a major operation. I had to have a hysterectomy, I had to go into radiation therapy, and that took up a huge part of my life,” she revealed. “Despite having gone through all of that — and any cancer is really tough to accept, to steel yourself to go through all of the necessary procedures to get back into health — the minute I had the operation, I suddenly felt like myself again.”

Kingston starred on the medical drama for eight seasons, from 1997 to 2005. Apart from her talents as an actress, she’s currently competing on the U.K. version of Dancing With the Stars, BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing.