'Being honest with the children has not been easy,' she wrote, 'one instinctively wants to protect them by lying and saying that things will get better. But this would betray their trust.' A video camera was bought and everything and anything was recorded. Didn't they tell you I'm dying of cancer?'Elliott was an inspirational young woman She loved theatre, films and opera and bubbled with life. After one gruelling session with a tabloid photographer I heard her say: 'No, I can't climb on a five-bar gate for another picture. In May one of the first of these one-stop cancer screening centres was opened by her consultant in Dorset, in Dorchester.Elliott's determination, personality and natural gifts as a communicator were put to good use to increase awareness of the scale and devastating effects of this cruel disease. With increasing dexterity and confidence Elliott handled hardened journalists with humour and, when necessary, a quick tongue. Despite a mastectomy, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, it spread to her lungs.

Her response, with John's support, was to team up with the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer to raise money to establish a breast cancer research centre in London. Her horror at the incidence of breast cancer, particularly in younger women, women like her, fuelled her resolve. 'I HAVE good days and bad days, but above all I have busy days. Each night I pray that I don't die tomorrow because I have too much to do.' So wrote Lesley Elliott last December at the height of her campaign to 'put breast cancer on the nation's agenda'. A Dorset farmer's wife, and mother of three small children, Elliott had her life shattered in 1992 when, at the age of 33, she was told that her breast lump was malignant She had breast cancer.

Lesley Ramsay, campaigner: born Bristol 1 November 1958; married John Elliott (one son, two daughters); died Dorchester, Dorset 23 July 1994. The Curse of Frankenstein was an immediate box-office success for the newly formed Hammer Films in 1956, and it was followed by The Revenge of Frankenstein two years later. Cushing was first seen as Professor Van Helsing in Dracula (1958), which again paired him with Christopher Lee, playing the vampire.Cushing became typecast, subsequently appearing in horror films such as The Brides of Dracula (1960), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1964), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), The Vampire Lovers (1970), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), Dr Phibes Rides Again (1972), Dracula AD 1972 (1972), The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973) and House of the Long Shadows (1982). Although many of them were not horror pictures, it was for that genre that he was to become best known.

While continuing to work on television, and winning a best television actor award three years running (1954-56), Cushing was regularly working in films again from the mid-Fifties. It was in television that he began to be known to a wider public, appearing in many productions during the early years of the decade, most notably the serials Pride and Prejudice (1952) and Epitaph for a Spy (1953).But it was the role of Winston Smith in that chilling television production of Nineteen Eighty-Four that made film directors see Cushing's potential. During that time, he played Joseph Surface in The School for Scandal, the Duke of Clarence in Richard III and Ivan Lomov in The Proposal. His subsequent West End plays included The Gay Invalid, Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra (all 1951).Cushing's association with Olivier and the Old Vic had already led him to play Osric in Olivier's Oscar-winning film production of Hamlet (1948), but the cinema did not find a place for him until the mid-Fifties. It was while acting with the company in Noel Coward's Private Lives that he met his future wife, the actress Helen Beck, who played his leading lady.Back on the professional stage, Cushing made his West End debut in War and Peace, at the Phoenix Theatre, playing two roles, Alexander I and Captain Ramballe.