Cancer's new poster girl - Dying TV star turns public spotlight on ravaging disease
Published: Monday | February 23, 2009
LONDON (AP):
Bald from chemotherapy and so weak she had trouble standing, British reality TV star Jade Goody married her 21-year-old sweetheart on Sunday - and her every tear was captured for the cameras.
The wedding extravaganza for the brash 27-year-old, now dying from cervical cancer, has captivated Britain and much of the world and helped turn the loud-mouthed Goody from the star everyone loved to hate to the one they can't praise enough.
Goody and Jack Tweed received a standing ovation from 200 guests once they were married at the Down Hall Country House Hotel in eastern England, Goody's spokesman, Max Clifford, told reporters after the ceremony.
The bride had painkillers stashed inside her designer dress. When she felt unable to stand about half an hour into the 45-minute service, she sat down, her husband-to-be knelt beside her, and her two young sons scrambled on to her lap, the spokesman said.
"It was just a very beautiful, very moving service," Clifford said.
Only weeks to live
Doctors say Goody only has weeks to live. She decided to film her struggle with cancer and earn as much as possible in the time she has left in order to fund her sons' education.
Now known to most Britons simply as 'Jade', Goody was plucked from obscurity to play in 'Big Brother', a British reality show, in 2002. Her eye-popping gaffes - she infamously complained of being "an escape goat" and questioned whether English was spoken in the United States - made her so mocked that her old south London school defended itself by saying she wasn't a typical pupil.
Goody cashed in on her notoriety with an autobiography, fitness videos and a line of perfume, but her clashes with Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty during the filming of Celebrity Big Brother in January 2007 saw her branded a racist and ejected from the show in disgrace. It was while she was filming that show in August that she learned she had cervical cancer.
Widespread support
Prime Minister Gordon Brown called her situation tragic, while the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, described Goody as "a brave woman".
"A lot of people might say 'well, it's better if she did everything in quiet'," Murphy-O'Connor told Sky News in comments broadcast Sunday. "But I think she's made a decision that she wants the last months of her life to teach people something."
Others noted that cervical cancer screenings, which can catch the disease when it is more easily treatable, have spiked in Britain since Goody's condition hit the headlines.
"Jade Goody has done what no public-health campaign has been able to do in the past, which is get widespread public attention on to the screening issue," British lawmaker Dr Liam Fox told Sky.
Her plight even softened hearts at Britain's Ministry of Justice, which allowed Tweed, on probation after assaulting a teenage boy with a golf club, special dispensation to spend Sunday evening with his bride.