ER alum Alex Kingston is opening up for the first time about being diagnosed with womb cancer last year.

The British actress, best known for playing Dr. Elizabeth Corday in the long-running medical drama and River Song in Doctor Who, shared her health scare in a wide-ranging interview with the U.K.’s The Independent newspaper published on Friday, October 10.

Kingston, 62, told the outlet that she had experienced bloating and aching pains for some years, but only got checked out in 2024 after noticing blood in her urine.

“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,’” the actress said. “But a lot of how I was feeling was to do with my illness.”

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“I never went down the cancer road in my head,” she continued. “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.’”

Describing one particularly traumatic experience, Kingston said she experienced a hemorrhage while on stage performing at the Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex, England, last spring. (Kingston performed in The Other Boleyn Girl between April and May 2024.)

“That was really shocking,” she said, noting that her hefty Tudor-period costume and knee pads helped her mask the incident. “I just knocked my knees together and prayed that it would soak everything up.”

“The wardrobe women were incredible,” she added. “I ran off-stage 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.”

Following the play’s run, Kingston was diagnosed and spent much of the rest of the year seeking treatment. She said that the cancer was in her fallopian tubes but had not spread to her ovaries.

“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 said of her treatment, which concluded at the end of 2024.

“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 said.

While best known as an actress, Kingston is currently competing on the 23rd season of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, the U.K. version of Dancing With the Stars. She credited her health scare with saying yes to the show after longing to participate for years.

“When they approached me, I thought of that cliché: life is too short. Go for whatever it is you secretly long to do, because if you’re not brave, and you don’t do it, it won’t happen,” she shared.