Robert Lindsay has said a friend’s warning led him to get checked for prostate cancer, and that the advice “saved my life.” The Sherwood actor made the disclosure on Good Morning Britain on Tuesday, June 2, as he urged more men to speak up and get tested.
Lindsay, 76, said the appeal should start with men talking to one another more openly. “First of all, there’s got to be a dialogue between men, really between men,” he said, adding that men do not discuss health problems as freely as women often do. For him, the warning came from a friend who told him to get checked, then died a couple of years later.
“It seems silly! I was told by a friend, who unfortunately passed away literally a couple of years afterwards,” Lindsay said. “He said, ‘Robert, please get yourself checked,’ and he saved my life.” His comments give his campaign a clear personal edge: prostate cancer is not only something he lived through, but something he believes can be caught earlier if men take a simple warning seriously.
Lindsay was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010 and has been free of the disease since 2018. He has said he had to make a decision with his wife after the cancer got close to the periphery, and that he eventually had it removed. Looking back on that period, he has described it as awful, and said the diagnosis left him thinking he could be dying while he was recording with Zoe Wanamaker in front of a studio audience of 500 to 600 people.
That is why his latest message is not just about his own recovery. Lindsay is now campaigning for the NHS to acquire additional equipment that would allow less-invasive examinations for prostate cancer rather than surgical procedures, a change he says could make testing easier for men who might otherwise put it off. The unanswered question is when that equipment will reach the health service, but his public push is aimed at making sure more men do not wait as long as he did.
