Barry McGuigan got emotional on Monday’s episode of I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here.
The boxer opened up about losing his daughter, Danika McGuigan in 2019.
The actor, who starred in Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope and alongside Steve Coogan in Philomena, was diagnosed with bowel cancer at the age of 33.
She passed away just five weeks after being diagnosed.
Speaking about the loss of Danika, Barry admitted: “I used to go to church a lot but after my daughter, not so much. I used to go incessantly but when you lose a child…”
He went on to say: “She had done all this work to get to where she was, she’d just won at the Toronto Film Festival. She had stage four bowel cancer and five weeks later, she died. She suffered so much pain and she said, “Mum, I can’t hold on.”‘
Danika was praised for her work and posthumously won an award for Best Actress in her final role in Wildfire.
He went on to describe Danika’s first diagnosis with leukaemia when she was just 11 years old. He explained that time was “very tough”.
“Then I was making the movie The Boxer with Daniel Day-Lewis, three weeks from the end I had to leave because she had been diagnosed with leukaemia. They thought she wasn’t going to get better but she fought back and she won it. She had two years of chemo, she did good, she came back,” he explained before breaking down into tears.
He was comforted by former X Factor judge Tulisa, who said: “You’re a man feeling pain and you’re vulnerable about it – that takes strength.”
Barry and his wife Sandra are proud parents to their sons, Shane, Jake and Blane, while Danika was their only daughter.
