Lysette Anthony on the tragic twist to her grand ardour with Riders display screen god Marcus Gilbert: ‘He referred to as me after a blazing row and I did not decide up. He died and I did not know. I failed him’

Lysette Anthony is ‘broken’. Her tears won’t stop falling and, some days, she is so grief-stricken she can hardly pull herself out of bed. 

In January, the ‘impossibly beautiful’ Marcus Gilbert, who played Rupert Campbell-Black in the first TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Riders and with whom she shared a ‘partnership of dreams’ for three years, died at the age of 67 after a courageous battle with cancer.

It is impossible not to feel desperately sad for 62-year-old Lysette.

When they were in the first throes of this wondrous love affair, she told me she felt ‘like a prize’ for about the first time ever. Marcus, too, was ‘giddy’ with happiness when I met him three years ago.

He had never anticipated being involved with anyone again after the death of Homaa, his dearly loved wife of 28 years, until he sent Lysette a ‘very sweet letter’ when he learned she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

Suffering with the devastating disease himself, he told me he couldn’t imagine the ‘free-spirited’ actress, with whom he’d had a brief affair on the set of Barbara Cartland’s A Ghost In Monte Carlo three decades earlier, being similarly afflicted.

‘I never remembered much about our affair on that film,’ he said. ‘But what I do remember is every single word I said to her on set when my character was marrying hers, ‘I will love you and cherish you for the rest of my life.’ I said it with great heart.’

His final words to his ‘beautiful Lysette’ were similarly heartfelt. He told her: ‘I wish we had more time together.’

But when he died from the throat cancer that spread to his liver and bones, Lysette was apart from him.

In a truly tragic twist to a love story that spanned more than 30 years, they’d had a rare argument four weeks earlier over his plans to spend the weekend with some old family friends. Lysette wasn’t invited.

‘I felt those friends, who had been friends of his wife’s since school, never wanted me to really be part of his life,’ she tells me.

‘I didn’t want to put up with it anymore. I’d asked him to make a choice and he chose them. Whether that’s because he felt guilty about their history, I don’t know, but that’s when I said, ‘If you choose them – choose to hurt me, choose to betray us, then, what is this?’

‘As Marcus himself would say, he was no saint. That is precisely what made him so deliciously human and compelling. But we barely ever argued and we weren’t very good at it. He walked out of the door. At that moment, I didn’t care if he never came back. That was the last time I saw him.’

Lysette admits she can be ‘a bloody nightmare’, particularly on what she calls ‘rainy days.’

So much so that when Marcus began writing to her, leaving messages and sending flowers a week or so later, she told him to stop.

‘He was pleading with me at the end saying, ‘What we have is so rare’, but I was in so much pain I wasn’t going to be wooed back.’

When Marcus tried to call her a final time, she didn’t answer. Nobody warned her he was dying. She only learned of his death when a mutual friend texted her to commiserate.

‘I was devastated,’ she says. ‘I had not been told definitively, ‘He’s dying right now.’ But then I didn’t pick up the last phone call, so is it my responsibility? I don’t know.’ 

She shakes her head as if trying to rid it of the thoughts that trouble her.

‘It seems impossible to say I didn’t know he was dying, but he’d been dying since the day I met him. That sounds callous and awful, but how many times do you have to be told someone, who is so vital, has six months to live – then another six months and another and…’ 

Lysette starts to sob – huge, heartrending sobs that make you want to put your arms around her to stop her pain.

Suffering dreadfully with Parkinson’s, which has increased its cruel hold upon her in the last year, she remains luminous but must set an alarm to remind herself to take her medication every three hours. The drugs are so potent that it takes her a while to rally her thoughts after each dose.

‘I keep going back and back saying, ‘Did I fail? Did I fail him?’ Of course, I failed him. But did I? Whatever happened to us?’

What indeed? The last time I met Lysette and Marcus, eight months after they started seeing each other in January 2023, they were so blissfully happy and optimistic. 

That was despite Marcus having recently completed a course of chemotherapy for the throat cancer he had been diagnosed with just weeks after reconnecting with Lysette, and which would ultimately claim his life.

Their love affair was rekindled after 30 years when, following that ‘sweet letter,’ they met at a restaurant in London for lunch and talked until seven o’clock in the evening. 

Immediately afterwards, Lysette called her best friend.

‘I said, ‘I don’t know what’s happened but my life’s changed.’

‘I’m not too sure whether Marcus was expecting to turn up for lunch and we’d sort of count our pills and see how miserable we were,’ she says now.

‘But we spoke about everything. We just didn’t stop talking. He spoke about his wife and grown-up children – all the wonderful times – and we laughed so much, had so much fun. 

‘I remember him saying, ‘This is the third act. There’s only one life. Let’s go out with a bang.’

Two months after that glorious date, when Marcus was told he required chemotherapy, they rented a ‘very expensive shed’ in the grounds of a country house in Guildford near the hospital where he was being treated.

Such was their determination to enjoy this third act, that Lysette remembers a truly joyous summer.

‘I used to tease him ridiculously,’ says Lysette. ‘He’d be straight out of the most horrendous treatment looking like he’d been to a bloody spa. He was very stoic. The way he dealt with everything – the way he dealt with the pain – just took my breath away. I loved being there.

‘We’d eat together, go for lovely drives, walk Delilah [Marcus’s beloved golden retriever]. He wasn’t confined to bed – well, not in terms of illness.’ She throws her head back and laughs.

‘Christ, he was so beautiful. He was obviously older than when we first made love, but I’d look at the curve at the back of his neck… He was so beautiful. When we were on our own we had an ability to live really, really well together.’

Marcus had a wide circle of friends, many of them women, who were a huge part of his and his wife’s life. Lysette admits it was never going to be easy to be accepted by them all.

‘Those friendships were longstanding,’ she says. ‘Entering that world later in life was never going to be simple. At times, I felt reduced to something far smaller than the adult reality of what we were.

‘I sensed Marcus was allowed to have a nice little relationship so we could comfort each other over our Parkinson’s, but I wasn’t allowed to be part of his life. And, as for the fact we were having a very sexual relationship with this amazing chemistry…’ 

She widens her eyes in mock alarm.

‘Although Delilah, who slept in our bedroom, did not help. The first time we stayed with these people she took my rather nice lingerie and stockings and ran around the house with them. To get to breakfast after your knickers in the morning is not the best ice-breaker.

‘But right from the start they were lecturing me on which so-called friends wouldn’t accept me, what problems there were going to be and with whom.’

Lysette says things ‘settled’, particularly when, at the end of that summer, Marcus marked the milestone of having completed his chemotherapy treatment by ringing the bell at Guildford’s Royal Surrey County Hospital to signify the start of a new, hopeful future.

But shortly before Christmas 2023, which they celebrated with Marcus’s two grown-up children and Lysette’s son Jimi, now 21, they discovered his cancer had spread to his bones. The following month liver cancer was diagnosed.

‘Marcus was told he basically had six months, but nothing changed,’ she says.

‘He was energetic. He’d eat and drink. He seemed to be amazing. It was clearly miraculous because we’d literally been told he’d be gone by the next Christmas. But Marcus began to cut off from me.

‘We’d always had this amazing ease of communication. We weren’t frightened of words. We weren’t frightened of emotions. We were amazing together but, that Christmas [2024], Jimi was with his dad. I was meant to spend it with Marcus, but then I was disinvited. I spent Christmas on my own and I’ve never known loneliness like that.’

Lysette chooses her words carefully. She is an astonishingly open, honest woman but knows how dearly Marcus loved his family and wants to spare their feelings.

‘He just said it would be difficult for them if I was there,’ she says. ‘He explained that when his wife was dying [of pancreatic cancer] he felt excluded in part because there was like a pecking order of those who wanted to be with her.

‘I understand Marcus’s relationships with his family pre-dated me by decades. Those bonds were formed in school days and shaped by the life he built with his late wife. 

‘I respect that completely and I wasn’t competing for a position in grief but I felt, little by little, I was shown the stool I was allowed to sit on. I was definitely being left out. 

‘I remember one weekend Marcus was going away with his friends for the solstice. He said, ‘They just want me and Delilah to go over.’

‘There just happened to be another woman there, an old friend of his wife’s. So, there were two couples, this woman and him.’

Lysette was terribly upset.

‘I talked to Jimi about him cutting off from me. He’d say, ‘Mum, you know he’s complicated but I think he’s dying. He just wants to have a nice time.’

She shows me her Instagram where there are numerous photo montages of them sharing the sort of blissful times that marked so much of their extraordinary relationship.

There is a reel of photographs taken, all those years ago, on the set of A Ghost In Monte Carlo.

‘We were so bloody young,’ she says. ‘I clearly absolutely adored him. I can tell by the way I’m holding my hands – sort of a little limp, a little pathetic. Look at him, he was so alive, so young with the whole world ahead of him.

‘When we got together [three years ago] and we had this extraordinary experience, there was all that optimism then. We found each other. Marcus had actually stopped acting so I was starting to write a film for us about people meeting in later life.

‘I knew he could do it. He had it in him to be magnificent and was just starting to unfurl. I wanted to write this story for him.’

She continues to scroll through photographs of the many happy days they shared: walking Delilah, shared laughter, hugs, rolling on meadows of wildflowers.

She stops at a montage of photographs from last March. ‘We were away in the country,’ she says. ‘It’s probably the last time we were really happy – but look.’ 

She points to the final photograph of her and Marcus, in which a hearse passes in the background. A look of pain spreads across her face.

The alarm rings to remind her to take her medication. We’ve been talking for most of the afternoon. Lysette is tired.

‘We could have had this amazing, amazing life,’ she says. ‘An amazing ending.’ Again, tears fall.

‘When he died his family posted a photograph of him on Instagram. He’s literally lying on our bed in the house he bought when we were together. They wrote something like, ‘Now Daddy’s with Mummy.’

‘I understand people mourn in their own way on social media, but I could have done without discovering a photograph of Marcus dead in our bed. That was a brutal moment.

‘But, as Jimi said, ‘Mum, you were never going to be there. It was always going to be that.’

‘So yes, I feel broken. Yes, I feel more lonely than I’ve ever felt. And yes, when I heard he’d died, I was devastated and shocked. But he made a profound sort of choice between two worlds, so I’m not going to feel guilt.’