Anne Diamond revealed she has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Holding back tears, the TV star shared the news with Dan Wootton during an interview on GB News on Thursday June 8.
The TV legend, 68, who presents the weekend breakfast show on the channel, shared that she has undergone a double mastectomy – which she found "incredibly hard."
After a five-month break from the show, former TV-am Good Morning Britain host Anne shared that she was set to return to the screen this weekend with co-host Stephen Dixon – despite still being in the deep end of her cancer battle.
"I haven’t been on a world cruise, which is what a lot of social media has been saying. It hasn’t been a world cruise, it has been a fight against breast cancer. I'm still not at the end of the journey, but I'm through it enough to come back to work," she told Dan.
From being a panellist on Loose Women to her 2002 stint on Celebrity Big Brother, Anne has been a household name in British television ever since rising to prominence in 1983 when presenting alongside Nick Owen.
The journalist was made OBE in the 2023 New Year Honours, a day which was more bittersweet than the public knew at the time – as it was the same day she received her cancer diagnosis. Speaking of the day, Anne shared: "That was a wonderful moment and was like 9.30 in the morning. But I knew, because I'd already seen my GP, that I had to go to a breast cancer screening later in the morning. I thought I would just go for a mammogram, and a couple of tests and I'd be free in an hour."
Sharing that she ended up still being there by lunchtime after a range of scans and mammograms, she added: "A lovely lady came with a lanyard around her neck that said MacMillan Cancer Care and I knew then it was serious."
Anne, who is a mother-of-five from her previous marriage to Mike Hollingsworth, has undergone a full mastectomy and radiotherapy to treat her cancer.
"I had the full works, the full mastectomy. God, this is the first time I've talked about it, so it's quite difficult but I've had the full works. The first operation I had was nine hours long," she said to Dan while holding back tears.
Continuing: "I don't remember it. I was in and out like that, but nine hours of removal and rebuild, that took a lot of getting over and then I had an operation later where they took out lymph nodes as well, just to make sure they can trace the travel, if the cancer has travelled at all to the rest of the body. Luckily I don't think it did. I've had a load of radiotherapy, which I found very hard too. "
Anne's OBE was awarded for her services to public health and charity, including her campaigning for awareness of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
The broadcaster has been an advocate for raising awareness since her third child Sebastian died of cot death in 1991, leading the 'Back to Sleep' campaign which urged parents to check that their babies slept on their backs instead of their fronts.
Joining often controversial channel GB News in 2022 to host the weekend breakfast show with Stephen Dixon, Anne will return to the show from this Saturday as she continues her battle.
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