Source : PERTHNOW NEWS
Sir Simon Russell Beale feels “normal” amid his cancer battle.
The House of the Dragon actor revealed in April he had been diagnosed with colon cancer last year, and as he prepares for his ninth month of chemotherapy, which he hopes will be his last, he insisted he doesn’t feel ill.
He told The Times newspaper: “I feel fine. I feel normal.
Simon – who kept his health battle secret for eight months after dropping out of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of Titus Andronicus at the Hampstead Theatre in London in September due to “ill health” – starts rehearsals next week for a new stage production, I’ll Be Seeing You, in which he plays Liberace, and knows he will find out then if the chemo has affected his stamina.
He said: “We’ll see next week.
“Obviously I had to drop out of Titus… you think it wouldn’t matter that much, but it does.” In 1993 he had to withdraw from playing Richard III for Sam Mendes after slipping a disc in his back doing the famous hunch. “I remember thinking at the time, ‘It won’t matter.’ I was absolutely devastated.”
The 65-year-old actor thought it was right to be open about his illness when he pulled out of Titus Andronicus.
He said: “I thought, I’ll just tell everybody, because then people are really nice and kind. Attitudes have changed.”
Simon has continued to work during his treatment, narrating a puppet version of Shakepeare’s poem Venus and Adonis this year, though there were some issues with “logistics” when the production went to Romania and he had to travel back and forth between there and the UK, while wearing a temporary stoma bag.
He said: “They put a pump on you at the end of each chemo session. But they said, ‘You can’t fly with a pump because of the air pressure.’ The whole thing has been about logistics. I refuse to face the other possibilities.”
The My Week With Marilyn actor, who is best known for his stage work, previously revealed he was diagnosed with cancer after being hospitalised at the end of filming House of the Dragon.
During an event at The Delaunay restaurant in London in April, he explained: “I’ve decided to tell everybody … I did the run [of Titus Andronicus] in Stratford, then House of the Dragon, and then had to be taken to hospital and they found that I had colon cancer.”
Simon went on to admit his health battle has been “a bore” and he’s not enjoyed missing out on work projects.
He added: “The last eight months have been, well it’s a bit tricky actually, it’s a bore obviously, but it’s also tricky dropping out of things, which I’ve never done before.”
