Penny Lancaster broke down in tears while discussing husband Sir Rod Stewart’s prostate cancer diagnosis.

Sir Rod, 74, was diagnosed with the illness in 2016 and decided to keep the news private.

He was given the all-clear in July after years of intense treatment.

Lancaster, Sir Rod’s wife of 12 years, recalled the day he was diagnosed.

Penny Lancaster
Penny Lancaster has recalled husband Sir Rod Stewart’s cancer diagnosis (Mike Egerton/PA)

Speaking on ITV’s Loose Women, she said: “We were in London. He’s very up on his health. He doesn’t believe in retirement, he wants to keep going forever, so he’s always getting screenings and tests.

“Rod had a few symptoms. It started moving quite quickly, the results, the numbers. They said we best do a rectal exam. It’s the only way. A specialist has to do that. And they did find a lump.

“Then it was like, ‘OK, we can’t ignore this’. We got the shock news it was cancer. We looked at the different ways of dealing with it.”

Lancaster, a 48-year-old model and TV personality, said the couple were left with an agonising wait for test results to see if the “aggressive” cancer had spread beyond Sir Rod’s prostate and into the rest of his body.

Luckily, doctors had caught it early. “It came on really quickly”, Lancaster said.

“With Rod, it was an aggressive one. It left the gland and travelled to the outside tissues. So that was another scary moment where we had to have more invasive tests and scans to see if it was anywhere else secondary in his body, which was the most frightening test of all.

“But it hadn’t gone. It’s emotional. We kept it quiet for two-and-a-half years now. The positive news is we caught it early enough.”

Father-of-eight Sir Rod went public with his diagnosis in September and urged men over 50 to get checked.