Actress Amanda Peet revealed on March 21 that she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, during what was an already difficult time in her life as her parents were both in hospice care.
In a recent essay she wrote for The New Yorker, Peet, 54, detailed how she learned of her diagnosis in the summer of 2025 and the overlapping grief she experienced with her divorced parents receiving end-of-life care on opposite coasts.
“For many years, I’ve been told that I have ‘dense’ and ‘busy’ breasts—not as a compliment but as a warning that they require extra monitoring,” she wrote. “I had been seeing a breast surgeon every six months for checkups.”
“The Friday before Labor Day, I went for what I thought would be a routine scan,“ she continued. ”Dr. K. ... told me she didn’t like the way something looked on the ultrasound and wanted to perform a biopsy.”
“After the procedure, she said that she would walk the sample over to Cedars-Sinai and hand-deliver it to Pathology. That’s when I knew.”
The results detected a small tumor that would require an MRI to determine “the extent of the disease,” and was later confirmed to be stage 1 hormone-receptor-positive and HER2-negative breast cancer.
According to the Mayo Clinic, HER2-negative is the most common subtype of breast cancer, where the cancer cells don’t contain high levels of HER2 proteins, therefore making them less aggressive. When hormone-receptor-positive, the breast cancer cells have either estrogen or progesterone receptors or both.
While remaining in limbo with her own prognosis, Peet traveled to the East Coast after learning that her father’s condition had worsened, but did not make it in time before his death that Labor Day weekend.
“Our mother’s [hospice] had started in June, but our father’s was only a week in, so we hadn’t expected him to go first,” she recalled. “I flew to New York. I didn’t make it before my father took his last breath, but I got to see his body before it was taken from his apartment.
Upon returning to Los Angeles, the “Your Friends and Neighbors” star said with further testing, her radiologist did not find evidence of lymph-node involvement, but found a second mass in the same breast that turned out to be benign.
Her care included a lumpectomy and radiation therapy, and she was able to avoid chemotherapy, mastectomy or other more intense surgical options.
Following treatment, Peet received a clear scan in January of this year, offering a brief moment of relief before being faced days later with the reality of losing her mother, who battled Parkinson’s disease.
“The morphine was taking forever to kick in, and she was looking at the ceiling and whimpering, so I climbed onto her rented hospital bed to get in her line of vision,” she wrote, concluding her essay.
“We locked eyes and she quieted down, and then she and I continued to stare at each other for what felt like several minutes.”
Her mother died later in January.
