British actor Olivia Williams, known for her roles in films like The Postman and The Sixth Sense, is feeling more frank than ever these days. “I’m a bit less scared of the consequences of saying what I think,” the 56-year-old tells The Guardian in a new interview. The reason? For the past six years, she’s been living with a rare form of cancer.
In 2018, after four years of unexplained symptoms, Williams was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer that had originated in her pancreas and metastasized to her liver. It’s a slow-growing cancer that’s difficult to detect until tumors interfere with other organs. “It was quite obviously bad news to find I had a 7x4cm tumour in my pancreas,” Williams says bluntly, “but it was really f***ing awful news that it had gone to my liver.”
Resilience in the Face of Uncertainty
Despite the prognosis, Williams has continued working steadily, recently appearing in the hit series The Crown as Camilla Parker Bowles. But living with cancer means constant monitoring and treatment. “Every now and then I have to zap these metastases,” she explains. The uncertainty is challenging, but Williams leans on dark humor to cope.
“I’m a great believer in denial. I think that’s how I’m coping,” she quips. While some cancer patients say they’ve learned to “shake off the trivial,” Williams admits, “I feel a bit like Gulliver, pinned down by a thousand tiny pins of life.”
Getting insured for acting roles has become an ordeal, with assessors laser-focused on her likelihood of dying during a production. “They don’t look at you. They don’t see you,” she says of the dehumanizing process. “They’re just on to the oncologist every day, going, ‘How can you guarantee that this person isn’t going to die during production?'”
Taking on Misogyny in Entertainment
Living with a terminal illness has made Williams even more outspoken about the injustices she’s faced as a woman in entertainment. She describes the infantilizing treatment of actresses in costume. “You cannot behave as an independent thinking, moving, being,” she says. “You literally have to ask permission of a teenager with a walkie-talkie to go and take a s**t.”
On the topic of ageism and beauty standards, Williams applauds the progress of having two women in their 50s leading the new Dune TV series. However, she’s quick to note that ageism is still rampant, just coming from different angles. “The bollocks is just coming at you from a different direction,” she says wryly.
AI Threatens Actors’ Rights
Williams also weighs in on how AI poses a serious threat to actors’ likeness rights. She says standard contracts now give producers ownership of actors’ likenesses “on any platform now existing or yet to be devised throughout the universe, in perpetuity.”
“When I say to my American attorney, ‘What the f**k?’ he goes, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Olivia, they’ll never enforce it,'” she explains. “It’s corporate bullying.” The problem, Williams notes, is few can afford to take on media giants in court.
Throughout the ups and downs of her career and health challenges, acting remains Williams’ anchor. The rare ability to tune everything else out and focus completely on her character is what drives her. “When I’m acting, I can tune out a gunshot quite close to my head,” she says, recalling a startling moment on the set of The Sixth Sense.
As she navigates an uncertain future, Olivia Williams refuses to be anyone but herself – direct, passionate, and unwilling to settle for the status quo, in her industry or her own life. “I’m afraid I will be very particular,” she tells the interviewer. “Watch out, I’m even less inhibited than I was.” It’s that candor and fighting spirit that make her an enduring inspiration, on screen and off.
