Lee
Remick:
HOW I BEAT CANCER
by Marie Terry
Globe
April 17, 1990
“My recovery was nothing short of a miracle,” Lee
Remick declares just months after conquering deadly lung and kidney cancer
and heading back in front of the camera.
“I’m really looking forward to this. I have never felt better, and I’m ready to get on with living.”
The 54-year-old beauty is co-starring in a TBS television miniseries, The Young Catherine. Filming is in Moscow and Leningrad – and Lee says she’s rarin’ to go.
Lee’s world collapsed early in 1989 when doctors broke the terrible news that she had cancer.
“Nothing compared to that experience,” she says. “I could have let the cancer kill me, but I had to take charge and fight.
“From the very first day, I was determined not to give cancer any part of my life. The most important thing is not to hand yourself over to doctors and say: ‘You fix it.’ With cancer, only you can fix it.
“The cancer changed me. You learn not to let the little things get you down because the struggle for survival is the most important thing in your life.
“Until then, I thought my divorce from my first husband, Bill Colleran, in 1968 after 11 years of marriage, was the hardest thing I’d ever been through. But I was wrong – fighting cancer was.”
Lee had surgery to remove one of her kidneys, and she also underwent torturous experimental treatment.
“My treatments were drastic, even horrible,” she recalls.
Recently, doctors found no traces of the tumors that had invaded her lungs. “I’ve been given a clean bill of health,” she says. “I’m very lucky.”
Lee has two children from her first marriage, Kate, 31, and Matthew, 29.
She’s been married to producer Kip Gowans for 19 years, and admits she couldn’t have won her battle against cancer without him. “He’s my life, and I’m his,” she coos.
Her film credits include The Long Hot Summer, Anatomy of a Murder, The Omen and an Oscar nomination for The Days of Wine and Roses. In her 34-year career, she also starred in a string of TV movies and miniseries, and she was most recently seen in A Bridge to Silence, co-starring Marlee Matlin.
The Young Catherine is her first role since her recovery.
