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Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio help save mum's life after raising money for her cancer treatment

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio save cancer mum given just months to live

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio have helped to save a woman’s life after raising money for her cancer treatment.

Last year, the Titanic co-stars teamed up to auction off dinner dates “with Jack and Rose” in order to raise money for his foundation as well as for expensive immunotherapy treatment at the Hallwang Clinic in Germany for new mum Gemma Nuttall.

Winslet had came across Nuttall’s Gofundme page while researching ovarian cancer after her own mother was diagnosed with the illness. Sadly she died last year but that spurred the actress on to help the young mum.

Nuttall had been diagnosed with the condition during her pregnancy but waited until after the birth of her daughter Penelope to have treatment. The chemotherapy worked but then the cancer came back, this time in her brain meaning she needed more financial help to secure treatment.


“I can tell you exactly what happened,” Kate said on This Morning over the phone during an interview with Gemma. “I lost my own mother last year in May to ovarian cancer and at the time that we as a family were given a very poor prognosis for my mum after a four year battle.’

“We decided to look elsewhere and we also stumbled across these places in Germany and simultaneously I also came across this petition that had been set up on Change.org, campaigning to have immunotherapy available on the NHS. My heart sank. I then found her [Gemma’s] go fund me page. I saw how much she needed to raise, at that point […] there was only £9k. I thought, “I can’t have this happen.'”

Kate then said she enlisted the help of Leonardo.

“We got close to £200,000 and at that point I thought, “It’s time to call my friend Leo”, she said. “He said, ‘We will auction off a dinner with Jack and Rose.’ And we raised $1.3 million dollars. We did three [dinners]. Half would go to his foundation.”

The fundraising paid off and now Gemma is clear of cancer.

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