Lysette Anthony Opens Up About How She Hid Health Battle From Soap Bosse

Lysette Anthony was killed off the soap last year, was diagnosed at the same time she landed the role in 2016. She asked her sonnot to tell anyone because she was afraid of losing her job playing Marnie Nightingale.

Lysette said, “I remember when we moved up for Hollyoaks, the hardest thing – and I feel so bad about it – was saying to him, let’s find someone you definitely can talk to, but you cannot confide in anyone because I’ll lose my job.

“Being a single parent and being an actor, it’s nigh-on impossible. How are you meant to work?

“When I was giving birth to Jimmy, they wrote it into the story and then were like, can you hurry up? That’s the trade-off.”

It was only her onscreen son Greg Finnegan who knew about her diagnosis.

Parkinson’s disease is a condition where parts of the brain become progressively damaged over many years.

She went on to reveal that she first started noticing symptoms after hearing Billy Connolly talk about living with the condition on Desert Island Discs.

She said: “Just hearing him talk, I just thought, ‘That’s what I’ve got’.”