Patti Scialfa, wife of the rock star Bruce Springsteen and a longtime member of his E Street Band, revealed in a new documentary that she was diagnosed with a form of blood cancer in 2018, which has led to her curtailing her public appearances and band performances in the years since.
Ms. Scialfa’s diagnosis of multiple myeloma was revealed in “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” a behind-the-scenes documentary about the New Jersey-born artist and the famed circle of musicians around him. The film premiered this weekend at the Toronto Film Festival.
“This affects my immune system, so I have to be careful what I choose to do and where I choose to go,” Ms. Scialfa said of her diagnosis in the film, according to Variety.
Ms. Scialfa, 71, has been an E Street Band institution since the 1980s, well before her marriage to Mr. Springsteen in 1991. She joined the group days before it embarked with Mr. Springsteen on the 1984 “Born to Run” tour, the longest and most successful in the band’s history.
She has been a fixture onstage and beside Mr. Springsteen for decades, and has dabbled in and out of her own solo career in addition to being a backing vocalist in the E Street Band. She was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame along with the rest of the E Street Band in 2014.
The news of her diagnosis answered a question that has lingered around the band’s current worldwide stadium tour, which is in its second year: why Ms. Scialfa has been largely absent from the stage, on the band’s first tour since 2016.
“Every once in a while, I come to a show or two and I can sing a few songs onstage, and that’s been a treat,” Ms. Scialfa said in the film. “That’s the new normal for me right now, and I’m OK with that.”
It was unclear whether Ms. Scialfa was still being treated for the disease or was in remission.
The news underscored an unavoidable reality, one with which Mr. Springsteen has openly wrestled in the latter years of his career — and especially during this most recent, demanding world tour: Mortality comes, even for rock stars.
Mr. Springsteen himself was forced to postpone a host of stadium and arena dates in 2023 after he was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer, and the band has borne its share of loss as it enters its fifth decade performing together. Mr. Springsteen still pays tribute during his shows to his bandmate and friend Clarence Clemons, the E Street saxophonist who died in 2011.
Still, such unavoidable facts haven’t deterred Mr. Springsteen, who reportedly told fans in the post-premiere Q&A session at Toronto that he had no intention of stopping.
“If I went tomorrow, it’s OK” Mr. Springsteen said, according to Rolling Stone.
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