Anna Chancellor: 'A kind of rave' held in hospital chapel as actress remembers final days with daughter Poppy who died from leukaemia

The 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' actress lost her only child, Poppy, in September 2023. Poppy, who was 36, died from leukaemia, but despite the heartbreak, Chancellor recalled an "extraordinary" time spent together in her final days.

Speaking to The Times, she said: "(There's a chapel at the Royal Marsden) and the whole family came. We stayed up all night, drinking in the church, playing the piano and having a kind of rave. Nobody told you not to do it."

Reflecting on her daughter's impact, she added, "I can’t even tell you how many extraordinary things there were about Poppy dying. With her art, her friends, her causes … Poppy was our star. She wasn’t famous but there was something so great about having your own star because normally everything that gets touched by fame gets ruined by it."

Poppy, an illustrator, had set up a bereavement support group called Griefcase after her father, poet Jock Scot, passed away from cancer in 2016. On the same day she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, she made a detailed death plan, including sitting with Chancellor to arrange her own funeral.

Anna recalled, "She wanted to come to the funeral director with me. We sat there going, ‘Do you think we should have horses and plumes?’ She was rigorous with her dying, as with her grief. She had life insurance. She had every relationship sorted, every amends made, no bad vibes. She was so brave, she was extraordinary. Her friends loved her. She just seemed to find joy and art and beauty in things. When she was told she had leukaemia, she turned to me and her husband (Jonny McKenzie-Wynne) and went, ‘Why me? I’m a laugh.’ And she was."

Initially, Poppy had been told she had a 70 percent chance of survival, but complications from a stem cell transplant proved fatal.

"I don’t think it was ever going to be true: she was very allergic to medicine, she was a hyper-sensitive person; even with the Covid injections she came up in terrible rashes," Chancellor explained.

Since losing her daughter, the actress has been overcome by waves of grief but said she has often cried in public without drawing attention.

"In a way, when you’ve lost your child you are given a bit of a gold card. People expect it. And what’s been lucky for me is that I have had the ability to go out in public and cry wherever. There’s nowhere I’ve been where I haven’t broken down. I’ve cried on trains, really cried, and no one’s noticed. No one was looking because I am middle-aged and I am invisible."