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Cancer-stricken star 'unwell' ahead of marriage
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-02-22 11:45

LONDON – A dying British reality television star was feeling unwell from "overdoing it" the day before her televised wedding, her publicist said Saturday, and it was not clear whether she would be well enough to continue with a ceremony that has gripped the country.


Cancer-stricken reality TV star Jade Goody and her fiance Jack Tweed, right, share a kiss on the drive way of her home in Upshire, southern England Saturday Feb. 21, 2009. The couple are scheduled to marry Sunday in a lavish ceremony at a country house hotel just eight miles from her home. [Agencies] 

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Jade Goody went from being the poster child for British boorishness to an exemplar of bravery after her cancer diagnosis.

"Hopefully she'll be okay in the morning," publicist Max Clifford said. "She's possibly done too much today."

Goody is preparing for a celebrity wedding, but it's far from a typical celebrity marriage. The bride, 27, is bald from chemotherapy. The groom, 21-year-old Jack Tweed, is out on probation after assaulting a teenage boy with a golf club. She'll have a pouch concealed under her designer dress for the painkillers. He'll be wearing an electronic monitoring tag.

The brash Goody was plucked from obscurity to play in "Big Brother," a British reality television show. Her eye-popping gaffes -- she infamously complained of being "an escape goat" and questioned whether English was spoken in the US -- quickly made her a target for ridicule.

Goody cashed in on her notoriety with an autobiography, fitness videos and a perfume line, but allegations of racism during a subsequent television appearance further clouded her reputation.

Goody's image began to turn around when she was diagnosed with cancer during the filming of a reality television episode in India last year.

Her decision to film her struggle with the disease, and make as much money from the process as possible for the benefit of her two sons, has drawn praise from all corners of British society, including the once-hostile press.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday that Goody's story was tragic. The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, said Goody was "a brave woman."

"A lot of people might say, 'Well, it's better if she did everything in quiet,'" Murphy-O'Connor told Sky News television in comments due to be broadcast Sunday. "But I think she's made a decision that she wants the last months of her life to teach people something."