Billy Connolly has had a rough couple of years, to put it mildly.

In one week he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, deafness and prostate cancer.

Then close friend Robin Williams took his life last month, aged 63.

Just last week he was in excruciating pain from gallstones and had to undergo emergency surgery to remove them.

“I have been through the wars. I am getting old,” says the comedian and Hollywood star, still with a twinkle of the manic energy that announced him to the world.

“I have had 71 incredible years. I had pneumonia in my twenties but nothing since then. I guess you get your lot. Some have it sprinkled through their life and others get it, whammy at the end.

“The week I found out about it all was quite funny, it was like a comedy sketch. I got acid reflux, deafness, cancer and

Parkinson’s in the same week.

“You have another meeting and you get another diagnosis.

“Last week I got stones in my gallbladder and that’s a f***ing hairy one. It is still very sore. It was hellish before the operation.

"I had this pain in my ribs the whole night.”

(Image: Getty)

It seems the less Billy knows about it all the better. Not for him the anxious patient questioning his medical team.

Last August he had his prostate removed but in the aftermath of the operation he nearly died from a potentially lethal blood clot.

His wife Pamela Stephenson, the former Not The Nine O’Clock News comedy star, spotted the danger immediately.

Speaking in his hotel suite just hours before last night’s premiere of his new film What We Did On Our Holiday, the father of five says: “They cut out the prostrate through that miniature stuff, just two wee holes.

"I don’t know if there’s a risk of the cancer spreading, not that they told me. I don’t ask.

“I am very much on the outside of it all. I don’t really bother much about it.

“The blood clot was in my right leg and it was part of the cancer. I went for a walk and got in terrible pain and I had to come home. My leg was all swollen and Pamela drove me to the hospital.

“According to Pam it was touch and go but I am an outsider to these things.

“I am a bit of a dimwit, I flit around on the outside of it all.”

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Cancer and gallstones free, Billy is coping with the Parkinson’s. His hands are firm and steady as he drinks a glass of water at London’s Soho Hotel.

He says: “I have Parkinson’s disease, it’s OK. I am seeing a specialist and he took me off the drugs I was on.

"I was on stuff called ReQuip but the side effects were stronger than the effects. It brought on a kind of dullness.”

Glasgow-born Billy stumbled into stardom. His mother abandoned him when he was four and his father, on his return from the Second World War sexually abused him.

Young Billy trained as a boilermaker in the shipyards, but in his spare time he was a folk singer, finding fame with the late Gerry Rafferty in The Humblebums.

But his switch to comedy was an instant success and from stand-up, and his acclaimed appearances on Michael

Parkinson’s chat show, he branched out into film.

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Billy returns to his roots next month with a stand-up tour of Scotland and his battery of illnesses will provide plenty of material. But he certainly doesn’t want to be the poster boy for Parkinson’s.

He says: “Some people go on the internet and research it and they email me and say ‘I have discovered this about Parkinson’s’. I’m ‘f*** off, talk about something else’.

“Others say ‘we are meeting on Wednesday’. I can’t think of anything worse than sitting about looking at the worst guy in the room and thinking ‘that’s how I’m going to be’.

“F*** that!”

He did, however, make an exception for one man – his old friend Robin Williams.

(Image: Donlad Stewart)

Like Billy, The Good Morning Vietnam star was diagnosed with Parkinson’s shortly before his death but told only his closest family and friends.

He turned to Billy, who had gone public about his condition the year before, for guidance.

Billy smiles as he says: “He was diagnosed after me and he was on the phone a lot asking me about it.

“But phoning me for advice is an absolute waste of f***ing time because I don’t have it.

“It broke my heart when he died. I was in Malta with my family and my children were all crying. They all loved him.

“He is a stunning guy... You notice I don’t speak about him in the past tense?” Billy pauses. “It’s still not sunk in, I keep expecting him to walk in.”

The pair first met on a Canadian talk show 30 years ago and Billy recognised a rare talent. They quickly became firm friends and Robin was a regular summer guest at his Scottish home.

In the pair’s penultimate phone call last month Billy did manage to give him some advice about how to handle the lack of facial expression that is an effect of the disease.

Just days before he took his life, Robin called to thank him for the tip.

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Billy says: “He phoned me a week later, just days before it happened, and he said ‘it’s brilliant it’s working’.

“During the call he kept telling me he loved me. I said ‘I know’. But he kept repeating it saying ‘do you really know I love you’. I was thinking what the f*** is he on about.?

“After his death I thought ‘oh my God he was saying goodbye’.”

Billy goes quiet when he remembers another phone call on the day Robin died, wondering if the depressed star reached out to him in his final hours.

“I thought he phoned me in the middle of the night... but he couldn’t have,” he says softly.

“My phone went in the middle of the night and I just left it.

“The phone was on the other side of the bedroom and I thought f*** that, it’s four in the morning. When I got up it was a Californian number. But he didn’t have my Maltese number... so it couldn’t have been him. It couldn’t have.”

Billy, like all of Robin’s fans, wants to remember the happiness his friend left behind.

He says: “I know nothing about it but it seems to me that everything got on top of him, his show coming off the TV, his age, Parkinson’s and blah blah blah.

"And he just did the thing. But his legacy is immense, his record is there for everybody to see. He was such a joy, he never had a bad word to say about anybody.

“I enjoy bitching about people. He would just laugh. I never heard him do that ever.”

Remember Robin Williams' most memorable movie performances in our retrospective.

Last June, at the height of the midge season, Billy headed to the Highlands of Scotland to film bitter-sweet comedy What I Did On Our Holiday, made by the team behind TV comedy Outnumbered.

Starring with Rosamund Pike and David Tennant, he plays a grandfather with terminal cancer who has his family descend on him for an unwanted birthday party.

Yet all through filming he kept his own cancer secret from the cast and crew.

Billy says: “My character is a lovely guy who just wants to be on his own. He is kind of sick, not unlike myself, and he’s a bit grumpy.

“At the time I knew I had cancer but I had not been operated on.

“I hadn’t told them and in the movie I have to say to my granddaughter ‘I have cancer’ and it was the first time I had said those words to anybody apart from Pamela and the family. But no-one else.

“It was very peculiar and strangely eerie that moment. It was quite easy to get into the mood of the character because it was very real to me.”

As I leave him to prepare for the premiere, Billy shakes my hand. Despite everything he’s been through, he still has the grip of a Glasgow boilermaker.

What We Did On Our Holiday is in cinemas on Friday.