Anna Chancellor and her family held "a kind of rave" in the hospital chapel in the days before her daughter died.
The 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' star's only child Poppy - who she had with late ex-partner Jock Scot - passed away from leukaemia in September 2023 aged 36 but despite her sadness, the 59-year-old actress remembered an "extraordinary" time with her daughter at the heart of things.
She told The Times newspaper: "[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.
"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.”
The illustrator - who set up a bereavement support group called Griefcase in the wake of her dad dying of cancer in 2016 - had made a death plan on the same day she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia and sat with Anna to plan her own funeral as well as making other arrangements for after her passing.
Anna said: “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."
Poppy had been told she had a 70 percent chance of survival but a stem cell transplant "killed her almost immediately".
Anna said of her odds: “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.”
The 'Hour' actress has regularly been hit by waves of grief over her loss but insisted "no one's noticed" when she has broken down and cried.
She said: “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.”
