Kelly Bishop recalls learning “Gilmore Girls” costar Edward Herrmann had cancer from newspaper: 'Don't let this be true'

Bishop and Herrmann played husband and wife on the series for eight years.

Kelly Bishop and Edward Herrmann were quite close while filming Gilmore Girls together from 2000 to 2007, even sharing a trailer. But enough distance had crept into their relationship by the time Herrmann was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer that Bishop had to learn about it from the newspaper.

"I hadn't even known he was sick until one day a couple of weeks before he died," she reveals in her recently published memoir, The Third Gilmore Girl. "I happened to be scanning Page Six of the New York Post… when I noticed a brief article about some trouble between Ed and his business manager. I was just skimming it until I came across the words, 'Herrmann, 71, who is battling brain cancer…'"

Bishop says she "must have stared at those words for ten minutes, hoping I'd misread them, or that maybe it was just a misquote or something." But when she "ran out of desperate excuses and let that news sink in, it felt like a vicious gut punch."

Herrmann wasn't public with his cancer diagnosis, which led to his death at 71 on Dec. 31, 2014. His agent and manager, Robbie Kass, only revealed after his death that the actor suffered a seizure in December 2013 that eventually revealed a grade IV glioblastoma, the product of a common and often fatal type of brain cancer.

Bishop writes that upon learning of Herrmann's condition, she "almost reached for the phone to call Ed's wife, Star, but she and I barely knew each other, and I was afraid I might be intruding, so I called Lauren and Amy instead." Lauren Graham, Bishop's onscreen daughter, and Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls, were "as terribly shocked as I was," Bishop remembers.

"We struggled to even figure out what to say beyond 'Oh my God,' and 'Please don’t let this be true,'" she adds.

Related: Lauren Graham and Kelly Bishop have Gilmore Girls reunion: 'Here's to the ladies who lunch'

Bishop and Herrmann played fan-favorite characters as Emily and Richard Gilmore, the WASPy, emotionally cold (in the case of Emily) and aloof (in the case of Richard) parents of Lorelai (Graham) and grandparents of Rory (Alexis Bledel). The Dirty Dancing actress refers to Herrmann as "my great pal, my set buddy," and "my extraordinary 'husband' for seven years."

Herrmann's wife, Star Roman, eventually called Bishop herself, inviting her to say goodbye to Herrmann. "I knew I'd regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't summon up the courage to get past all those tubes and beeping monitors and focus on the fact that this was Ed lying there," Bishop recalls.

Related: Gilmore Girls cast: Where are they now?

Bishop was eventually able to say her goodbyes, whispering to a comatose Herrmann that "Lauren, Amy, and Alexis sent their love." She then "kissed him on the forehead, left a lip print, and whispered, 'Tell them that’s from me.'"

Gilmore Girls was canceled after its seventh season. That season saw the dramatic departure of Amy Sherman-Palladino and co-creator/writer/husband Daniel Palladino, which led to a steep decline in quality in the eyes of many fans. As Bishop put it in her memoir, "A new writing team was brought in for the seventh season, and I know they tried their best, but there's no such thing as 'trying to be' Amy Sherman-Palladino."

Nine years later, Gilmore Girls was revived for a four-part Netflix miniseries called Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. Herrmann had already been gone two years, leaving behind a deeply felt absence to which the revival paid touching tribute.

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"It's sad without my darling Edward Herrmann," Bishop told Entertainment Weekly before the release of A Year in the Life. "We used to do our crossword puzzle together in the makeup trailer. If we had a short day and were feeling festive or belligerent, we'd go across the street and have a martini together."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.