She’s suffered her share of nasty blows over the years but Stephanie Forrester is a tough cookie – she’s bounced back from losing her husband, her company, her memory, suffering a stroke, being shot and having her grandchild Phoebe (Mackenzie Mauzy) die in a tragic car accident.
But will she be able to cope with the latest ordeal The Bold and the Beautiful producers have cooked up for her – being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer?
Nobody knows Stephanie better than actress Susan Flannery (72) – after all, she’s been playing the feisty Forrester matriarch for 24 years.
But as a cancer survivor herself the latest plot twist cut really close to the bone.
After being diagnosed with colon cancer in 2000 Susan decided to keep the news out of the media. “I had the surgery and came back to work three weeks later,” Susan reveals as she chats to us over the phone from her home in Santa Barbara.
Read more in Jared Orlin and Emile Butler’s article in YOU 24 November 2011.