Amanda Abbington felt relief when cancer scare sparked Strictly exit

Amanda Abbington was relieved when a cancer scare gave her a reason to quit 'Strictly Come Dancing'.

The 50-year-old actress left the Latin and ballroom contest in week six last year citing personal and medical reasons and later accused professional partner Giovanni Pernice of bullying and abusive behaviour, but she's now revealed she was also dealing with a health issue at the same time after finding lumps in her breast.

She told The Sun on Sunday newspaper: "By my final week, on the Thursday morning, I was in the shower and I found two lumps. I’d got the all-clear after a mammogram a couple of months before.

“I went in for rehearsals to do the cha-cha-cha and just couldn’t concentrate. Giovanni said, ‘There’s no point teaching you this because it’s not going in. You can’t get it. We’ll be lucky if we get through because you’re useless’.

“He refused to even look at me so I went to the toilet, came back and said, ‘I’m going to go to the hospital now because I found two lumps in my breast this morning’.

“Then he was great. He said, ‘Well, let me know how it goes’.

“It was the catalyst I’d been sort of waiting for, which is terrible.

“But that’s what I was thinking, that it was a healthier option than being in that room.

“I’ve championed breast cancer charities but there was a part of me that was like, ‘OK, I have to deal with this now instead. Phew’.”

Amanda - who was later told the lumps were benign - claimed rehearsals with the 34-year-old dancer became unpleasant "fairly quickly".

She said: “It descended into him calling me names, saying I was stupid and lazy, that I danced like a vegetable.

“It was an onslaught of being told you’re not good enough.”

And the 'Sherlock' star had been warned about his behaviour, as she claimed she received texts from some of his previous celebrity dance partners.

She said: “I had about ten messages from people going, ‘I’m so sorry that he’s your partner’.

“They were people who’d worked on the show. Two or three were his ex-dance partners.”

As well as support from her fiance Jonathan Goodwin and her two children, Amanda also had the backing of her former partner Martin Freeman, who was so infuriated by the situation she had allegedly found herself in, he wanted to "kill" Giovanni.

She said: “Martin said, ‘I’m so sorry that you’re having to go through this.

“This is awful. You don’t deserve it. I want to kill him’.

“Martin said to me, ‘It’s so unfair, Amanda, because you would always be like, ‘I want to be in that show’. You were so good in it’.”

Earlier this week, the BBC published their report into the actress' complaint and offered an apology, though just six of the 17 allegations made against the professional dancer were upheld.

The report found that some of the language used by Giovanni towards Amanda could be "belittling" and agreed with the 'Mr. Selfridge' actress that his feedback was, at times, "overly negative"and that he had used profanity during rehearsals.

The report noted after reviewing several hours of rehearsal footage as part of an official investigation that there were two moments of "inappropriate behaviour of sexual banter in the workplace", which were found to simply have been "made and received as jokes" between the pair.