Tiny tim daughter1/2/2024 ![]() So how, amid all the upheaval, practical and emotional, has she managed to make her acting debut in a top London theatre? “It’s turned our lives upside down,” he says of her illness.Įleanor is learning to read braille and walks with a cane. Sometimes I’m a bit sick.” This is something of an understatement, her father gently points out. The treatment, says Eleanor, “makes me feel rubbish. “She’ll be a different little girl tomorrow,” says Tim. It’s hard to imagine that the following day, this energetic child will be horribly sick and exhausted after another gruelling session of chemotherapy at The Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton. In a few hours’ time, she’ll be up there beneath the bright lights, living a fantasy come true. ![]() Today, she’s tucking into pizza and bubbling with excitement about her newfound success on the stage. ![]() “I don’t really remember it because I was so young,” she says when I meet her and her father for lunch near their home in Hampton.Įleanor is bright, chatty, articulate and irrepressible in some ways a typical eight-year-old - she takes her favourite teddy to every hospital appointment - but in other respects she’s had to grow up fast. “Our lives were literally changed in a moment.”Įleanor, fortunately, has no memory of the bombshell diagnosis. “ heartbroken,” says Tim, 48, who overcame testicular cancer 15 years ago. Eleanor is now on her third round of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy began eight days later and continued for the next 18 months. There, her parents were told what was causing their daughter’s sight problems: a large tumour - or low grade glioma - had been found in the hypothalamus region of her brain, over her optic nerves. But her eyesight soon deteriorated so drastically she could hardly see an object at her feet.Īfter several specialists had checked Eleanor’s eyes, she was sent for an urgent MRI scan, which she had on January 8, 2015, at St George’s Hospital in south London. At first they attributed the changes to her age, and suspected she would just need glasses. She started to draw things in closer to her face, lost interest in the television and meal times became difficult. But about five years ago, her parents Tim and Kelly noticed a marked decline in her visual abilities. It gives her something to focus on.”įor the first three-and-a-half years of her life, Eleanor was a perfectly healthy little girl. “We have to pinch ourselves because it’s like a dream. “It’s quite surreal,” agrees her father, Tim, a self-employed computer consultant. Not that you’d know it if you saw her on the stage. Diagnosed with the tumour at four, she’s been in and out of treatment ever since, and is currently undergoing weekly chemotherapy, along with regular MRI scans, hearing tests and blood tests. ![]() One of four children with disabilities playing Bob Cratchit’s sick son in rotation in this acclaimed adaptation of Charles Dickens’ much-loved novella, Eleanor has rather a lot to juggle. That is, when she’s not undergoing treatment for a brain tumour that has left her severely visually impaired. She attends a mainstream school in a suburb of south west London. Talented, yes undoubtedly but Eleanor is no drama school pupil. In the case of Eleanor Stollery, such assumptions would be wide of the mark. Should you find yourself in the audience of The Old Vic’s production of A Christmas Carol this year, you might assume the cute eight-year-old girl playing Tiny Tim is another of those talented child stars, plucked from some elite stage school. ![]()
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