Jeff Bridges was determined to walk his daughter down the aisle after his cancer battle.
Jeff Bridges was determined to walk his daughter down the asile following his battles with cancer and COVID-19
The 72-year-old actor - who has daughters Isabelle, 41, Jessica, 39 and Haley, 37, with wife Susan Geston - was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2020 and contracted COVID-19 shortly after but after receiving treatment enlisted the help of a trainer to make sure he could give his youngest away during her wedding to Justin Shane in 2021.
He said: "I had a CAT scan: I had felt, like, a bone in my stomach where a bone wasn’t supposed to be, and I thought I better get that checked out. They got a cocktail that worked, and oh man it worked fast. That thing just imploded. But COVID made the cancer look like nothing. It just kicked my a**. God, it brought so many different emotions and feelings,” he says. “Fear wasn’t a real strong one. It was mainly kind of the feeling of getting with the programme, you know. Here I am, I’m sick, I know I don’t want to die because one of the things that the illness brought to my attention is how much I love being alive. COVID exacerbated all these feelings of love for my wonderful family. The first goal was how long can I stand up. and my record was 45 seconds, that’s how long I could stand up. And then it was, how many steps can I take? Oh good. Now I’m going to walk down the hall – all this with oxygen, of course."
The Academy Award-winning star went on to add that "one day" he was able to walk again and even got to dance with his daughter at her nuptials.
He told The Independent: "Finally, one day I said, ‘Maybe I can do it, you know.’ And it turns out I not only got to walk her down the aisle, but I got to do the wedding dance [to Ray Charles’s 'Ain’t That Love']. That was terrific!"
Tagged in Jeff Bridges