"I just appreciate the chance to be alive." Dolph Lundgren, star of Rocky IV and the saga "Expendables" revealed in the American show In Depth, fighting cancer secretly for 8 years.
"I've had a great life. I lived five lives in one. I didn't feel bitter, I just felt sorry for my children and my fiancée [Emma Krokdal]," the Swedish actor said of his illness. In 2015, doctors removed his first kidney tumor in 2015. Five years later, the 65-year-old star is again feeling "a kind of acid flow".
"Two or three years to live"
After an MRI, "they discovered another tumor in the liver the size of a small lemon," says Dolph Lundgren in front of the camera. Cancer that has spread to his lungs, spine or stomach. "How much time do you think I have left? The doctor said something like two or three years. But I could hear in his voice that he probably thought it was less, "recalls the interpreter of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV.
The cause of his cancer is probably due to his steroid use in the 1980s and 90s. "We blame ourselves to a certain extent. I stopped taking it when I stopped making movies where I took off my top every scene," says Dolph Lundgren.
But since then, the future has brightened for the actor. His tumors have shrunk by nearly 90% – "I hope the drugs I take will remove everything else" – and he says he can beat his cancer once and for all "in the coming weeks or months".