I walked catwalk with Elle Macpherson – her most cancers declare is harmful

Marie Helvin doesn’t sleep well these days. ‘If I’m lucky, I get four, maybe five hours, but it’s all broken up,’ she says.

‘I’m up five times every night, and often only manage 15 minutes at a stretch. It’s pretty debilitating.’

It didn’t used to be this way for the 72-year-old supermodel, and the distressing change is down to a daily dose of Tamoxifen, a hormone-blocking drug that reduces the risk of cancer returning. 

She has been on medication for almost two years since her breast cancer diagnosis in the autumn of 2022, and will need to continue to take it for another four years.

It is a bitter pill to swallow, both literally and metaphorically, but while Marie may yearn for a less incapacitating alternative, she is under no illusion that the drugs are essential and administered by medics who are concerned only with her welfare.

Marie put her faith in those cancer specialists – as she first revealed in this newspaper in November 2022 while bravely detailing the mastectomy she had undergone after discovering a lump – and she continues to do so.

It is one reason she was alarmed to learn this week of the approach taken by one of her fellow supermodels, Elle Macpherson, who has just revealed her own breast cancer battle. According to the 60-year-old Australian, when she was diagnosed with the disease seven years ago she refused what she called ‘standard medical solutions’ and opted instead for an ‘intuitive, heart-led, holistic approach’.

In an interview with an Australian magazine ahead of publication of her memoir, Macpherson explained that while no fewer than 32 doctors had recommended a mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation, she had instead undergone a lumpectomy to remove the tumour then spent eight months in a rented house in Arizona.

There, with the support of a naturopathic doctor, an osteopath, chiropractor, two therapists and what she called a ‘holistic dentist’, she devoted ‘every single minute to healing myself’. As a result, she said, she was in clinical remission – although Macpherson prefers to instead use the term ‘utter wellness’.

Her astonishing claim has been greeted with widespread dismay by doctors, who have pointed out that it is extraordinarily rare for cancer to vanish without medical treatment.

Marie goes one step further. While she is delighted that her former catwalk colleague – the pair once strutted their stuff in Paris at a memorably glamorous 1995 show for the French fashion designer Thierry Mugler – is thriving, she believes that her advocacy of ‘self-healing’ could be ‘upsetting’ for many women, and even prove downright dangerous.

‘If what she’s saying is true –- and I’m not saying that she’s being disingenuous – then fantastic. God bless Elle Macpherson, and how envious the entire community of all of us breast cancer survivors are feeling for her, and how lucky she was,’ she says. ‘But my problem is that we don’t know the full story –we only know part of it, which is that she says she’s in remission and she refused medical advice.

‘How serious was her cancer? She needs to come out with a very clear statement about what exactly it is that she had, and what treatment she did, because to give a message of that much hope can be misleading without the full information.

‘She’s in a very privileged position, and whatever she did and how she did it, then please tell us all, we’re all desperate to know, to be able to tell our daughters, our children, our friends. Maybe she does have something to teach us.’

She goes on: ‘I think it would be terrible if some woman in shock, on hearing she has breast cancer, thought she could do what Elle did and everything would be fine, or that someone undergoing chemotherapy thought maybe it wasn’t necessary after all.

‘I think that’s very dangerous.

‘Just because it worked for her doesn’t mean it would work for everyone. When she talks about standard medical solutions – it makes it sound like there’s conventional medicine and then there’s this alternative. And that just isn’t true, or not for the majority anyway.

‘Everyone’s cancer journey is personal to them, of course, but I absolutely would not do alternative treatments alone.’

The fear that Elle’s message may be misinterpreted is the reason Marie is speaking out today.

That, and her continued desire to be open and honest about the brutal realities of a disease whose effects can continue to linger long after the root cause has been treated.

‘The journey goes on, and it also goes into different branches, physically and emotionally,’ she says. ‘As of today I still have breast cancer, whether they removed my breast or not, and that will be true for several years until I have five years of clear mammograms on the breast that was unaffected.

‘And in the back of your mind, you always worry it is going to come back.’

Along with Macpherson’s revelation, Marie’s diagnosis is a stark reminder of the ruthlessly indiscriminate nature of the disease.

Both women were celebrated for their extraordinary physiques – Macpherson was known as ‘The Body’, while Marie’s sinuous limbs and striking feline features (courtesy of an American GI father and Japanese mother) saw her dubbed ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’.

Her beauty bewitched everyone from photographer David Bailey, her husband for ten years, to the late Mark Shand, brother of Queen Camilla. She saw her body as her ‘instrument’ and took great care of it, stopping smoking at 40, quit drinking 15 years ago and following a scrupulously healthy diet.

‘I honestly thought something like cancer couldn’t happen to me because I looked after myself so well,’ she says, shaking her head.

‘Well, now I know differently, and that’s why it’s important for me to speak about it.

‘My surgeon and my oncologist both kept stressing to me that because you don’t get regular mammograms at my age, self-examination is vital – I was the one who found the tumour – and if I can get one lady from my age group, or any age group for that matter, to get themselves checked out then it’s worth me losing my privacy.’

Marie has certainly been nothing but candid in sharing her experience since being diagnosed with stage one cancer in her right breast in September 2022.

She was told she needed a full mastectomy, but that while in her case chemotherapy was unnecessary she would need a prolonged drug regimen.

‘Both my oncologist and my surgeon made it very clear to me that I’m a very lucky case because it was found very early,’ she says.

‘They both agreed that because of the position of the tumour I needed a mastectomy, although there was not a necessity for chemotherapy or radiation. It was “imperative” though, that I take the oestrogen blockers for five years.’

She did not question this. ‘I placed my faith in them,’ she says. ‘They were very aware of who I was, the job I did, and I felt they were making their decisions based on what was best for me.’

Nevertheless, the treatment and aftermath were harder even than she had imagined.

‘I was shocked by the discomfort, the fact I could not raise my arm above my head for many months, and also that they don’t just remove your breast, they remove everything inside there.’

The consequences of that mastectomy and breast reconstruction are still felt today. Earlier this year, on a beach holiday, she realised she can no longer lie on her stomach on a sun lounger.

‘It’s like I’m lying on a ball, a hard ball, and I never knew that before. Yet, in a very bizarre way, the mastectomy was the easiest part of having breast cancer for me.’

The hormone blockers, which effectively stop oestrogen from telling cancer cells to grow, have in many ways taken a greater toll.

Marie started on one called Anastrozole, but found that after six months she was unable to withstand the crippling muscular pain that is a side effect.

‘I called my doctors in agony, saying, “I just can’t take it any more.’ When I woke up in the morning, it was like I had the body of 2,000-year-old woman,’ she recalls.

‘I could barely get out of bed. It would take maybe three hours before I’d be able to move my fingers, and the pain was just awful. I was going to the gym, trying to help my recovery and get everything back to normal, but I would come back in tears. I was so depressed, in pain.’

Cancer nurses initially suggested a mild antidepressant which had been shown to mitigate some of the side effects of Anastrozole, but this made her feel generally unwell.

‘At this point my oncologist said she understood my apprehension, but she wanted me to try Tamoxifen. And now there’s no muscular pain, no depression, but I cannot sleep,’ she smiles wryly.

None of this is easy to talk about – Marie is naturally private – but she passionately believes it’s important to be painstakingly honest when your words have any resonance in the public arena.

We talk about the ‘Angelina Jolie effect’ – the huge worldwide upsurge in women being tested for the BRCA1 gene after the Hollywood actress revealed she had undergone a preventative double mastectomy after discovering she had the gene and was therefore at greater risk of developing cancer.

Marie, like Jolie, knew there was a history of cancer in her own family, having nursed her mother when she too underwent a mastectomy in the 1980s.

‘So when Angelina came out with her story, my sister and I both did the test,’ she reveals. ‘Thankfully my genetic testing showed nil BRCA, and the same with my sister. So that was a direct consequence of Angelina’s piece. Having said that, I still got breast cancer.’

Last month, when Mail columnist – and former Vogue editor – Alexandra Shulman, herself a breast cancer survivor, revealed she had been diagnosed with colon cancer, it prompted Marie to finally undertake the home NHS bowel cancer test that is sent every two years to everyone between 60 and 75, and which had been sitting untouched on her desk.

‘I’m like most women, I imagine, I kept putting it off. So taking that action came directly from Alex’s article.’

In March, when Catherine, Princess of Wales announced she was having preventative chemotherapy for cancer which was found after major abdominal surgery in January (underlining still further than even the enviable assets of relative youth and a royal title are no insurance against this most vicious of diseases) it led to a 373 per cent increase in symptom searches on the NHS website.

The princess went on to say she has ‘good days and bad days’, a statement that resonates with Marie. ‘It’s just very honest,’ she says.

By contrast, while she believes that Macpherson did not intend for her announcement to be misleading, she may have unwittingly led people to believe that she ‘cured’ her own cancer.

‘Remember that Elle is into wellness and all of that, so of course it makes complete sense that she would want to go down the road of holistic therapies,’ says Marie. ‘But she didn’t do it completely that way if she had a lumpectomy in the first place – and unfortunately, that’s the message that is coming across, that she refused all these different treatments and is now seven years clear.

Marie is a staunch believer in natural medicine, having taken supplements and homeopathic remedies for 20 years. She believes that along with the expertise of her surgeon, regular application of a homeopathic cream has helped reduce her mastectomy scar to a barely visible line, and credits the still enviably condition of her hair and skin to the supplements she takes.

‘I follow naturopathic, homeopathic medicine and have done for a long time, but not to treat my cancer – rather to help me feel strong.’

She certainly looks a world away from the fragile figure I encountered two years ago. Robust and radiant, she is back at work, modelling – including an underwear campaign for lingerie brand Bluebella and a walk-on part in Netflix drama called Geek Girl.

‘Last year was my recovery year, and this is my year growing back into me again,’ she says.

‘I wanted to show that however hard it can be, it doesn’t mean that life is over after a mastectomy – far from it,’ she says.

And as Marie would be the first to admit, it is thanks to her doctors that she is here to say it.