Sam Womack has a new mantra since beating breast cancer: Never say never.
At first, brutal, whirlwind treatment, including a lumpectomy and chemotherapy, left the former EastEnders star reeling. But she has found a sense of peace from shaking up her old life.
And discovering the cancer has gone sparked another surprising feeling... broodiness. “I suddenly really appreciated my kids,” she says thoughtfully. “I really wanted to do it all again.”
Her partner, Oliver Farnworth, who played Andy Carver on Coronation Street, has been by her side throughout the twists and turns cancer served up, and now the pair are carefully thinking about expanding their family together. Though at the age of 50 and after chemo, Sam knows it may not be quite so simple.
She adds: “Obviously throughout treatment, your ovaries are challenged because chemo can change your hormonal status, so I don’t even know if it would be possible now, post-treatment. And it sounds incredibly greedy because I’ve done it.”
She has children – son Benjamin, 21, daughter Lili-Rose and stepson Michael from her marriage to Mark Womack – but Sam’s brush with death has made her more determined to focus on living.
“Lili’s 18,” she adds. “But I just suddenly had this real yearning. It was like another little switch. Ollie and I talked about it and said, well, never say never. If it’s not possible naturally, there are other ways. I just want to celebrate life.”
Sam went public with her health battle last August. A routine check-up, prompted by the ill health of two people close to her, found a shadowy mass on her right breast.
But after treatment, it is time for normal life to resume – or what passes as normal for this couple, together for three years.
They’ve been cast in the touring run of 42nd Street, starting in July, and plan to travel in a campervan they’ve bought and adapted.
“Back in the pandemic, it used to be a big red bus for the elderly,” says Sam, who plans to pack as many of her rescue dogs in the back as she can fit.
“And we spent a lot of time getting it all changed. It’s especially lovely inside. When we’re not on stage, we can take the van and dogs and we can travel around and go for walks. That’s the idea!”
Sam and ex-husband Mark are still close, and even lived together – with the kids and Oliver – in lockdown.
“We had three teenagers, four dogs, a cat, two ponies...” she reels off on her fingers. “My ex and his family. Ollie’s family came to stay.
“We had quite a big dilapidated house you could compartmentalise into loads of different spaces, so while it was scary, it was also lovely having this precious group around.”
Sam first met Oliver when they both starred in a 2018 stage adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ novel The Girl On The Train, but it wasn’t until shortly before lockdown that they found love.
At 40, he is 10 years her junior, but the age gap hasn’t changed anything. Nor did cancer.
“He’s been incredibly supportive,” says Sam. “It’s a lot for a partner, you forget the disease takes over their life as well. We hadn’t been together long before the pandemic, and then cancer came – it was a lot for him to take.”
Oliver kept Sam’s spirits up while she was receiving chemotherapy by wearing her cool cap – a device to limit hair loss caused by the cancer-fighting drugs – and taking pictures of them mucking around.
“It was really important for me, for the first time, to relinquish control in front of a partner,” she says. “I’ve never let my guard down in the way that I did.
“I’ve never been used to asking for help, I was always fight or flight. I was terrified that if I was vulnerable, it would be seen as weak.”
Oliver has also helped Sam come to terms with her changed body.
Two weeks after the lunch break Well Woman check that caught her tumour, Sam had a lumpectomy and lymph node removal to take out the mass, then had chemotherapy and radiotherapy to eradicate any floating cancer cells.
“Your breasts are where life comes from, how you feed your children, but they’re also to do with your sexual identity,” she points out.
“When that’s attacked, it’s not just the disease, it takes all of that away from you temporarily.”
During treatment and recovery, Sam turned to Yes To Life, a National Lottery-funded support network that connects cancer survivors and gives them space to talk about their experience. “I fell in love with women during the whole process,” she says.
“Look at these incredible humans who are all taking care of themselves but also thinking about other people.
“What I find extraordinarily moving about women is they spend their life nurturing, and even after diagnosis, these women were telling me, ‘I don’t want to hurt my mum, I don’t want to worry my sister, I don’t want to scare my kids’.
“They would be crying in private.”
Sam’s friends played an important role too, lifting her up when she was struggling with the aftermath of treatment. Incredibly, her best friend Rita Simons – who played her on-screen sister Roxy to Sam’s Ronnie Mitchell in EastEnders – managed to keep quiet the news she would make a fleeting return to the BBC soap after their characters’ joint drowning deaths at the end of 2017.
“I spoke to her just a week before it came out as I’d heard something from other friends, but she hadn’t told me!” Sam laughs. “Would I ever go back? It would be a huge reach, but funny things happen in soap. EastEnders gave me some of the best years of my life.”
While undergoing two rounds of chemo using doxorubicin – nicknamed by patients the Red Devil thanks to its bright colour – Sam’s hair began falling out. “I lost around a third of it,” she says, running her fingers through the shoulder-length blonde crop that has since grown back.
Sam told her producer – she was starring in the stage version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the time – that she would go bald and weave it into her character’s look.
“It shows how manic I was at the time,” she says. “I read this article that said not everyone’s hair falls out with chemo, then I was like, ‘oh god, I’ve already promised to shave it off.’ I thought, well I’ve got to do something.
“So I had this really beautiful long blonde hair, and I hacked it off myself, in a very short bob. People at work were like, what the hell? Then I dyed it darker, then changed my mind, so tried to go back lighter and it went orange. And then I went to Spain to recuperate and it went green in the pool! I’d gone from looking like Elvis to the Grinch.”
The sudden death of Sam’s “soulmate” dog Lola made her pay attention to the amount of pressure she was piling on herself.
Sam had returned to the stage and ignored the pain – until Lola’s health rapidly deteriorated. While watching her German shepherd/greyhound mix taking her last breaths, Sam felt the bottom of her world fall out. “I just didn’t know how to process it. It was much more upsetting to me than my diagnosis,” she says.
She and Ollie flew to Spain, where they keep a home in the Valencian mountains. “I find it very soothing to be among nature,” Sam admits.
“Out there the mountains are very big, and you feel very small. They were here a long time before you, and they’ll still be here long after you.”
* The National Lottery Awards are the annual search to find the UK’s favourite National Lottery-funded people and projects. To nominate your favourite, tweet @LottoGoodCauses using the hashtag #NLAwards or complete an entry form through lotterygoodcauses.org.uk/awards. Entries must be in by midday on May 16 to be counted.
