Coronation Street legend reveals shock breast cancer diagnosis

She received the news just 20 minutes before starting a new job

The 68-year-old is a legend of the ITV soap, having appeared on the cobbles as Liz McDonald for 30 years, before she left the show back in 2019.

The star recently started a new job on Irish soap Fair City, and she opened up to Patrick Kielty on RTE’s Late Late Show about finding out about her diagnosis.

“I’ve had some tests just before I left the UK, and literally, 15, 20 minutes before I was in my dressing room at Fair City, getting ready to go on, and I was quite nervous and thinking, ‘I hope everybody thinks I’m all right’, whatever," she recalled.

“And my consultant rang me and said, ‘you’ve got to come back to the UK’.

“I said, ‘Well, I can’t possibly, I’ve just taken a new job’. I said ‘I’m away for a month’, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer.”

She went on to explain how doctors had caught the cancer in its early stages.

“I’m fine, I’m absolutely fine. My head was a bit mashed for the first few days.

“It’s very early stages, and I am along with thousands of other women as well.

“It’s early stages, I travel back to the UK tomorrow, just for a couple of weeks, they’re going to test lymph nodes and lymph glands and all that.

“But then I need an operation and some radiotherapy, and then I’m coming back to Fair City, so I will be back in just a few weeks.”

Speaking about Fair City, she explained how she initially was unsure if she wanted to do another soap.

“I got asked to do it almost a year ago now, and I said, ‘Oh I don’t know if I can do another soap, I don’t know whether I should do that’.

“And they said, ‘well, just have a look at it’.

“In the UK it’s quite difficult to get and so I was watching it on my computer, and I just became addicted to Fair City and I just thought, this is fantastic.

“The editing is so good. The scripts are amazing. Got my husband to have a look at it. And I said, ‘I can’t say no to this’.”

Callard is playing Lily, the long lost mother to Gwen, in the Dublin-set soap, and plans to move to Co Wicklow with her husband.