Several years ago, a close friend of the actress Lysette Anthony (pictured) telephoned her to share the devastating news that she had cancer. 'I found myself in the awful position of actually feeling jealous of the hell and horror of going through chemotherapy,' she recalls. 'Because terrible as it is, it meant there was hope. And it's the lack of hope that's so hard.' At the time that phone call arrived, Lysette, then 52, was facing her own shattering news, having just been told she had the progressive nervous system disorder Parkinson's disease.