Vanessa Feltz’s devastating family heartache as she opens up on tragic death

Broadcaster Vanessa Feltz’s mother died from endometrial cancer in 1997 at the young age of 57.

Vanessa Feltz talks about her mother’s cancer diagnosis

Broadcaster Vanessa Feltz has opened up about the “tragically young” death of her mother after doctors “dismissed” her. The This Morning star and Express.co.uk columnist was a guest on the Stirring It Up podcast with mother and daughter duo Andi and Miquita Oliver, when she broached the sad subject.

“She died at the age of 57, tragically young, and she died of undiagnosed endometrial cancer. This isn’t a fun subject but you know how they talk about medical misogyny and how women get discriminated against, I think she was dismissed as being menopausal and spoilt when she wasn’t at all.

“She wasn’t hypochondriacal at all, she wasn’t the kind of woman that takes refuge in being ill at all. They just got it completely wrong and ended up becoming really ill,” Vanessa recalled.

Asked if her mother had witnessed her success before her death Vanessa responded: “Well she saw the very, very beginning and I don’t think they [her parents] were all that impressed. They thought I was cheap, Jim Crackery sort of, attention-seeking trivia,” she said.

Vanessa Feltz has opened up about her mother’s death (Image: ITV)

“I think they really wanted me to be someone who was a very serious, heavy duty intellectual,” Vanessa pondered. “I think they would have liked me to make intense documentaries about inner city housing decay or something.

“Instead, I was bouncing about the stage saying, would you rather have an Italian stallion or a British bulldog,” she exclaimed.

Vanessa is in a pensive mood at the moment as she is currently writing her autobiography which she also discussed on the podcast.

Describing the process of writing it as “painful”, she cited her wedding as an example of a difficult subject to tackle.

Vanessa Feltz appeared on Miquita and Andi Oliver’s Stirring It Up podcast (Image: Stirring It Up )

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“Imagine writing about your wedding. Obviously you can’t write about it with the jaded misery of knowing that the whole thing crashed and burned because that would be a really weird way of doing it.

“So you have to do it as you really felt on the day, and on the day, I was absolutely supremely and sublimely, A, happy and B, confident I was going to live happily ever after. […]

“[The autobiography] is a way of kind of having to plough through all the bruising stuff that you’ve pushed to one side and tried not to think about for ages and soar above [all of it],” she told the hosts.