Actor Timothy Spall thought he ‘might not make it’ after being diagnosed with leukaemia.
The award-winning star, 68, who is known for playing Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter film series and starring in 2014 film Mr Turner, said the thought of leaving his family behind was ‘unbearable’.
Revealing his leukaemia diagnosis, which he received in 1996, Spall remembered thinking about the ‘horror’ of what dying would do to his family nearly 30 years ago.
It came just as he was about to receive acclaim as part of the cast for Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
‘I was 39 and we had three kids, and out of the blue I was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease called acute myeloid leukaemia. When I was told I had it, I got down on my knees and asked God to spare me for my family,’ he told Saga Magazine.
He then explained how ‘there was a time when they thought I might not make it’ during his experience with the disease, from which doctors gave him a 60:40 chance of survival.
‘The only really unbearable thing was what my family would do if I went? I wouldn’t be there to look after them, and that was my job as a husband and father,’ the Bafta-winning star shared.
‘The pain and the horror of what me dying would do to the people I loved was the only unbearable side of it. The rest I could take.’
Spall then recounted how one day, between treatments, doctors feared he had ‘relapsed’ after doing tests and discovering ‘a massive mushroom-type thing had grown in my lung’.
‘I was about to go and have full body radiation and a bone marrow transplant knowing there were things in my body that’d potentially kill me. That morning, I woke up and thought, sod this, I’m not going to die.’
Spall is married to writer Shane Spall and has three children: Rafe, who is also an actor, Pascale and Mercedes.
‘I didn’t know what made me ill but stress had something to do with it and the point is now to head off stress at the pass. It made me aware of things and become more selective,’ he told The Independent previously of how cancer affected his outlook on life and work.
‘I am less worried about employment. I really do my homework so I am not getting stressed on the set because I don’t know what I’m doing. It has also given me a connection to what people who are having a really bad time go through,’ he added in the 2006 interview.
The English actor won the TV Bafta for leading actor in 2024 for his role of Peter Farquhar in the true crime series, The Sixth Commandment, beating Succession star Brian Cox.
He also portrayed the Duke of Norfolk in the hit BBC Two series Wolf Hall, following the life of Thomas Cromwell, the principal adviser to Henry VIII.
Spall also admitted to Saga that he was ‘genuinely surprised ‘ by his win as he thought ‘it was a shoo-in for Brian Cox because Succession was such a popular show, and he was brilliant’.
The star said that on his sixth Bafta nomination without a win ‘I got used to doing the ‘smile’, so I thought it was going to be another one of those’.
He had previously been nominated for film acting Baftas for Secrets & Lies and Topsy-Turvy, and television Baftas for Our Mutual Friend, Shooting the Past and Vacuuming Completely in the Nude, a BBC Two film directed by Danny Boyle.
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