Unimaginable baby trauma for daughter of Australian TV royalty – after ‘impossible’ pregnancy joy turns to heartbreak

The daughter of the late comedy legend John ‘Strop’ Cornell and actor Delvene Delaney has revealed how she lost her unborn child just three months before she was due to give birth.

Actress Liana Cornell, 34, shared the heartbreaking news — just months after she was told she would never be able to have children — in a lengthy post on Instagram on Sunday.

She said she was forced to abort her unborn daughter when she was almost six months pregnant after doctors discovered serious complications and “deformities”.

“A little over a year and a half ago I was six months pregnant,” she posted. “Single and pregnant – two things I never really expected.”

The 34-year-old admitted that the traumatic loss of her first child came during one of the worst years of her life, after she lost her father and split from her lover.

My father died, my fiancé and I broke up a week before our wedding, [and] I have been diagnosed with a degenerative disease (from which I am now recovering).

‘A good friend of mine committed suicide, my hometown had experienced the worst floods ever, [and] family members nearly died due to chance events.

‘I couldn’t travel home because of everything that was happening in the world at the time, [and] ‘Britannia was not extended.’

The Byron Bay-raised star explained that she became pregnant when she was intimate with the child’s father for the first time, after a year of celibacy.

The miraculous pregnancy occurred just a month after she was told she would never be able to have children of her own.

But within a few months the joy turned to sorrow and then to indescribable tragedy.

“At first the father was excited and told me he wanted to have endless children with me,” she said.

“He told me he had never been so in love… and then he left suddenly, quickly and coldly, for no reason at all.”

As she nursed her broken heart, she realized that her unborn daughter, whom she named Nymphaea, had moved only once during her six-month pregnancy.

I went for an ultrasound [and] “My world came crashing down again,” she wrote.

“The baby had deformities. The circumstances were already against us, but I thought we would make it.”

She explained that the baby’s head was too big, the heart too small and the stomach swollen. On medical advice, she was forced to terminate her miraculous pregnancy, which took two days in hospital.

“After losing my baby, I developed severe postpartum depression without even realizing it,” she wrote.

‘My hair started falling out, my body stopped functioning.’

She said it was the beginning of a progressive decline in her health.

‘I had been bleeding for four months in places you shouldn’t be bleeding, it had nothing to do with the baby, it had everything to do with this. [unnamed] “disease,” she said.

Her health finally began to improve when she saw a new specialist, she said.

“She operated on me right away and at the end she gave me hope,” she wrote. “She also has this rare disease and doesn’t think it’s such a death toll.”

Now, 18 months after the devastating loss of her child, Cornell says she finally feels “healed and ready.”

“Although I did not give birth to Nymphaea, I did give birth to myself,” she wrote. “I am new, fresh, powerful in my truth, healed, ready.”

The actress is the goddaughter of iconic Australian actor Paul Hogan.

Her father John Cornell produced Crocodile Dundee and was Hogan’s beloved dimwitted sidekick on his TV show in the 1970s and 1980s, on which he co-starred with his wife Delvene Delaney.

The couple married in 1977 and had two daughters, Liana and her sister Allira. Cornell later developed Parkinson’s disease and died in July 2021 at the age of 80 at his Byron Bay home.

Liana graduated from NIDA in 2012. She is best known for her role in the historical fantasy drama Britannia between 2017 and 2019. Other credits include roles in Wolf Creek, Love Child and East of Everything.

Last year she bought a 15-acre estate in the Northern Rivers, near Mullumbimby, for $2 million.