Dot Cotton actress June Brown asked her former EastEnders co-star Michael Cashman to help her get an assisted death, the peer has said.
Speaking during the debate on assisted dying in the UK’s House of Lords, as the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill looks set to fall on Friday afternoon, Cashman said Brown had made the plea to him before she died in 2022.
Cashman starred alongside Brown, who played famous chain-smoking launderette worker Cotton in the long-running BBC soap, during his spell on the show in the late 1980s.
Cotton later went on to play a central role in one of the major euthanasia storylines on TV, when she helped fellow Albert Square resident Ethel Skinner die, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2000.
Meanwhile Cashman made TV history as his character Colin Russell was part of the first on-screen gay kiss on British TV in 1989.
Cashman said: “I also remember my dear friend June Brown, who implored me to get her to a country where she could die with dignity and the death that she wanted.”
The former Labour peer, who is now non-aligned, had previously spoken in the House of Lords about seeing a friend suffer who had asked him about an assisted death, but did not identify them.
He had said: “When my dear friend of many, many years suffered for months, she knew there was another way and she implored me to help her, my lords, I did.
“I was prepared to break the law as I contacted clinics in the Netherlands and Switzerland. However, it was to come to nothing.”
Cashman has previously spoken of how Brown had helped him get time off Eastenders rehearsals to attend protests against Section 28 in the late 1980s.
On Friday, Cashman said he had also watched his husband of 31 years die a “slow and agonising death” more than a decade ago.
“I deeply regret, my Lords, that we have not passed this necessary and I believe important Bill, we have not fulfilled the humane wishes of those who seek the right to choose how they die,” he said.