Alex Kingston on returning to TV after cancer treatment
The 63-year-old actor on being called a Nazi, her most challenging time and why her new role is a perfect return to our screens.
The 63-year-old actor on being called a Nazi, her most challenging time and why her new role is a perfect return to our screens.
I was lucky because my parents gave me a huge amount of freedom. I’m not particularly academic. I was a dreamer and they let me dream.
Mum was a painter and very creative herself but because my middle sister Susie was severely disabled, she was very preoccupied with taking care of her and so I was often left to my own devices.
I play-acted all through my childhood, creating all these different worlds in my bedroom at our home in Surrey. My sister’s condition also means I have never taken my life for granted and always tried to live fully.
Very much so, although as a child it made me feel slightly different from other people.
I had a very dear friend who like me had a German mother and at primary school the children would call us Nazis, though I don’t think they quite knew what that meant, just that our background made us a bit strange and threatening.
I feel more German than English. I don’t think I look particularly English.
That I’m still working! Once I’d left drama school, I absolutely thought that by the time I reached 40 my career would most likely be over and that if I was lucky, I would be married and have a family.
I imagined living in a nice little house in the country by then and growing my own vegetables. Within my lifetime, there’s been a huge shift in how people live, particularly women, and it’s fabulous.
Going through IVF to have my daughter Salome [now 24] was very tough. It builds up incrementally because you’re on this track and you knuckle down and do it because you have this end game.
But it is hugely debilitating, and I think when one’s in it, one’s not fully aware of how debilitating it can be, particularly if you go through several cycles as I did. I was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 2024, and I do wonder whether it’s connected in some way.
I’ve lived my life pretty cleanly, so it’s not like I suddenly decided I had to radically change my dietary habits. I’ve always been a positive, glass-half-full type of person, and going through a cancer journey has made me double down on that.
It makes you confront your mortality, but I intend to live to 100.
You’re about to appear in new ITV drama Secret Service. Have you enjoyed going back to television work?
Definitely. I was due to start another TV show when I was diagnosed with cancer and had to walk away – something I’d never done before and which felt very uncomfortable. Like many actors, you always fear you won’t work again, and I worried people might think I was unreliable.
Secret Service was the first job I was offered after treatment and it felt perfect – not a huge role, but enough to ease me back in. I’m also rehearsing for a role in Copenhagen at Hampstead Theatre [runs until 2 May]
[Hero image credit: Camera Press]
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