My hardest performance

"We did it to find a distraction, to find something besides the cancer, to make a project out of it," says Annabel. "It gave me the idea that the would have an ending and the ending would be that she was better, so it made me more hopeful. It also made it easier to look at her, to be by her side and see all the changes she was going through, to really be involved but to remain objective about it. It would have been really hard to stand by and not do anything."

The photographs show cancer - hospital beds, balding heads and what a mastectomy looks like. This isn't Lynn Redgrave the actress, this is Lynn Redgrave, scars and all. "I found it cathartic to look at the pictures, even the difficult ones," she says. "While it's happening to you, you look in the mirror and you don't recognise yourself. But when I looked at the pictures, I found it helpful to see its progress."

Did Redgrave ever feel it was an intrusion? "No, because it was Annabel. I couldn't imagine anybody else doing it. It had become our way of getting through. I thought it would be protective of her if she looked down the lens at me. In the end, she became my protector.

"As I was about to have chemo, the administrator at the hospital said they didn't want us taking photographs any more. I got so upset, I was crying. I realised that, to me, doing this project was survival. Some people hold a teddy bear, some people want music played to them, I wanted photographs."

So Annabel was there throughout with her camera; through the long months of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, through the hair falling out and the getting used to a body with a breast removed. There was one moment, when the drains were being taken out of her mother's chest after the mastectomy, when she wasn't sure what to do.

"She started crying as soon as they came out," says Annabel. "I didn't know if I should be taking a picture or running over to hug her. I decided to take it really quick and give her a hug. I ran every picture by her and she never censored me."

Redgrave had started to worry about a lump in her breast two weeks before she actually decided to do anything about it. "I was in denial, I thought maybe it would go away and I kept feeling it in the wrong place and think, yes, it's gone and then realised it hadn't."

She had recently moved to Connecticut from California and she hadn't yet found a new doctor. By chance, she was flying to LA for work anyway, so she was able to see her usual doctor.

Four weeks later, she had a mastectomy. Redgrave decided at the time not to have a reconstruction. "Why put yourself through surgery that you don't have to have? If I was much younger, then the issue of two breasts making you feel like a complete woman would perhaps be more important. But I think I'm a complete woman with one breast.

"There's an Amazon myth that there were women who took off their right breast so they could shoot arrows better. So I look on myself as the Amazon woman and I might take up archery," she says, laughing.

She doesn't have a partner and hasn't since she was diagnosed with cancer. Does it make her feel less attractive to men? "If I see someone and think 'ooh', it goes through my mind that if it ever leads to more than 'ooh', I would have to explain or prepare them.

"I think a great many men would have a problem with it but I guess those aren't the sort of men I want. I don't think it holds me back from looking, but they don't fall off trees when you're 62. I keep looking in the trees!

"If somebody were falling off the tree, I'd probably show them the book really quickly. If they wanted to still have dinner, I'll know it's not too bad. I haven't got to that point of the test yet."

Redgrave's very public divorce from John Clark, in 2000, shattered her. Clark had had an affair with the couple's PA, Nicolette, and secretly fathered a son, Zachary, with her. Nicolette, still refusing to divulge the identity of her child's father, then went on to marry Redgrave's son, Ben, and Lynn treated Zachary as her grandchild.

When Nicolette and Ben broke up two years later, Clark began pursuing her once more. She took out a restraining order on him - at which point the whole mess came out into the open, leaving Lynn Redgrave devastated. To call the divorce acrimonious is something of an understatement.

She never speaks to her ex-husband now, and neither do her children. "I tried to but it didn't work out," says Annabel. "He's missed out on this whole chapter." The Redgraves also have no contact with Zachary, though not through choice. "I wish we could see him," says Redgrave sadly. "We would love to see Zachary."

Redgrave started to go to church regularly during her treatment, something she hadn't done since she was a child. "I knew there was a woman minister at the church near where I live and that's where I go now. I've found it fantastically helpful and I think the forgiveness aspect is one of the most helpful things, it includes the times you need to forgive yourself."

And the times you need to forgive others? Her ex-husband? "I have begun to include him in my prayers," she says. "That took a big step but one day I was able to, so that was good. Anger goes away, that's always a good thing. The divorce was so long ago, I've almost forgotten it."

She flashes a smile at daughter. "Good thing I'm a good liar, isn't it? I realised I wasn't getting away with that one. But it was a long time ago so I've gone through that and come out the other side."

As if dealing with cancer wasn't enough, Redgrave also had to deal with the death of her mother. Vanessa Redgrave, who was starring in A Long Day's Journey into Night on Broadway, brought their mother to New York. "My mother didn't know I had cancer, she couldn't have taken that so that's why I didn't tell her.

"When she died, we cried and cried and missed her so dreadfully, but she went when she was ready and being a part of that, while I was also going through treatment, was a very profound experience. It made me look at death differently because I had never seen a dead person until I saw my mum. It made me less scared."

Redgrave is now, she hopes, free of cancer but she has check-ups every four months (for oncologists, five years from diagnosis is when you can consider yourself cured), but she is aware that she has a high chance of cancer returning.

"You don't miss the opportunity to see friends and family and you don't worry about little things. If, by waving a magic wand, I could go back to before and not have it but have to miss all the things I've felt in the past two years - the learning to live, the learning to really look at things, the closeness to Annabel and my children, my entire family encircled me with so much love and joy - then I'd have to say, I wouldn't change a thing.

"When you're a single woman after 32 years, you feel like you're starting a new life. And then you have cancer and you're really starting a new life. So this is my second new life: it's two years old. It's great being a two-year-old! I'm enjoying it very much. It's hard to have a really bad day when you're still around feeling good."

Journal: A Mother and Daughter's Recovery from Breast Cancer (£19.99) is published by Umbrage Editions.