Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon revealed to Good Morning America Tuesday that she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, but that she now is fully recovered.

The 42-year-old actress, who plays Miranda on "Sex and the City," said she wanted to keep the disease private while she went through treatment: "I didn't really want to make it public while I was going through it. I didn't want paparazzi at the hospital, that kind of thing."

Both Nixon's mother and grandmother have also battled breast cancer, so the diagnoses did not come as a big surprise to the lesbian actress:

"I always sort of thought, 'I'm probably going to get breast cancer. There's a really good chance.' I go for my completely routine mammogram and then I get a call from my gynecologist. And she says, 'Well, I have some — it's not such great news, but here it is, but it's very small and we're just going to get in there and take it right out, right away, and then you'll probably have radiation."

"I felt scared. Even though I felt scared and I thought, 'Oh I don't want this to be happening,' I was very cognizant of if it's going to happen, this is the best way for it to happen — that it's found so early and we can just get right on it," Nixon added.

Nixon said the ordeal was actually worse on her girlfriend of four years, Christine Marinoni: "My girlfriend was very scared. She was the one doing the eating. She was in a panic. She was just trying to calm herself down any way she could."

Nixon decided early to be open about the disease to her children: "I talked to them together and, basically, I told them, 'You know, they found some breast cancer in my right breast. It's very small. It's very early. I'm going to have an operation. They're going to take it out, and then we're going to have six-and-a-half weeks of radiation every weekday, and this is like what Grandma went through and I'm going to be fine."

Nixon will now help other women become educated about the disease and has signed on to be Ambassador for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation: "I want them [women] most to hear me saying that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. So the only thing to really be afraid of is if you don't go get your mammograms, because there's some part of you that doesn't want to know, and that's the thing that's going to trip you up. That's the thing that could have a really bad endgame."

Last update: 04-17-2008 13:45