‘I couldn't BEAR anyone WORRYING

When Dame Julie Walters was diagnosed with cancer, she didn't just keep it from the public, but also from most of her family..

She’s one of our most well-loved actors, having starred in a range of hit films –from the Harry Potter series and Billy Elliot to Mamma Mia.

So it came as a huge shock earlier this year when Julie Walters revealed she’d been secretly undergoing treatment for bowel cancer, which she has thankfully now recovered from.

But it wasn’t just the public that Julie, 70, was hiding her devastating diagnosis from. She didn’t even tell her daughter, Maisie, or her two older brothers, Tommy and Kevin, until after she had gone through the operation to remove tumours from her lower intestine.

Instead, she told Maisie she needed to have her appendix removed, as Julie explained to the Telegraph Magazine, ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of everyone worrying –particularly my daughter. I didn’t want to upset people around me. I wanted to keep it small.’

The only person who did know was Julie’s husband Grant Roffey, who she told as he sat in his car waiting for her to come out from her CT scan.