Home Alone actor Ken Hudson Campbell is said to be “overwhelmed” by the financial and emotional support he’s received for his recent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.
The 61-year-old actor, who starred as Santa Claus in the 1990 holiday classic, was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma — one of the most common oral cancers — in October.
Before his diagnosis, he had undergone a few procedures in January to remove areas of abnormal skin tissue. It was around the same time that his daughter Michaela said her father “lost his [SAG-AFTRA-funded] health insurance, and he had to stop going to the same doctors that he had been going to for a while about his mouth”.
“The last two years he’s gotten lots of biopsies done and they’ve tried to control it,” Michaela told People in a new interview. “And it was only this year that it just got very, very aggressive. So when he got his biopsy in October, that is when we got the diagnosis.”
Campbell was eventually scheduled to undergo surgery to remove the tumor on 7 December. A week before the procedure, Michaela created a GoFundMe to raise $100,000 (£79,000 ) to help with the cost of the 10-hour surgery, the six-month recovery and any chemotherapy he might need afterward.
“The first day we posted it, every time he read something, he would just burst into tears,” she said of Campbell. “It was the first time he really got emotional about the whole situation. It was kind of a shock to him to feel so loved.”
Ken Hudson Campbell in ‘Home Alone’— (Getty Images / 20th Century Studios)
With the help of over a thousand donations from friends, family and fans, including The Office star Steve Carrell, the campaign has surpassed its goal and raised $109,495 (at the time of writing).
“It really means the world,” Michaela added. “My family’s been struggling for a long time financially. So just having my dad’s friends come together, this is just very overwhelming and it really takes a lot of stress off of my family’s shoulders.”
Of his recovery, Michaela said: “I think the hardest part of this is going to be him losing his speech and his ability to talk. So speech therapy is going to play a big role in it.”
“We’re kind of playing it one step at a time, depending on how debilitated he is,” she added. “If he needs extra help, we might put him into a nursing home for a little while, but if not, we’re going to take him back home and we still will be hiring post-op care help with that.”
