Living Arts Centre

Brampton's Anne Parker, manager of corporate sales at Mississauga's Living Arts Centre, will be the subject of a film that explores her battle with breast and ovarian cancer

Anne Parker, one of the first women to undergo genetic testing for the breast cancer gene, has survived cancer three times.
Now Hollywood has come calling on the 58-year-old Brampton resident and manager of corporate sales at Mississauga's Living Arts Centre, whose loss of her mother and sister to the disease led her to suspect a defect in her family gene pool long before scientists found it.
Parker's battle against breast and ovarian cancer will be the subject of a movie from the same producer and cinematographer who made the Oscar-winning film Monster.
The independent film, Decoding Annie Parker, is supposed to begin shooting this March in Vancouver. It tells Parker's story, as well as the tale of Mary-Claire King, an American geneticist who spent years hunting for the genes she believed might be responsible for breast and ovarian cancer.
Steven Bernstein, who will make his directing debut, said: "It's a matter of faith. Anne had the ability to look into the future and keep believing in her survival, and if she just hung in she'd come to an understanding of things."
King was also sustained by faith, he said. "She spent 15 years of her life trying to prove something that people said wasn't provable and she succeeded."
Parker was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1980, at 29. She had lost her mother to the same disease when she was 13; her sister, who also had ovarian cancer, died when she was 27. For years, Parker said, she had asked for mammograms but was told, "I didn't need one; that there was no reason to believe that just because my mother and my sister died from the disease I was going to get it."
She was always compulsively checking her breasts.
Others thought she was a hypochondriac. It would be years before science isolated the genes involved, but "there was a voice in my head telling me the likelihood that my breast cancer diagnosis had to be somehow connected to some kind of flaw in our gene pool."
Parker's left breast was removed. She had chemotherapy.
When she was 38, she got ovarian cancer. She had her ovaries removed and more chemotherapy.
She survived. Still, she had no idea why she kept getting cancer.
In October 1994, the gene BRAC-1 was found; the following year BRAC-2. These genes are responsible for causing 5 per cent of all breast cancers and 10 per cent of all ovarian cancers. Suddenly, Parker realized she might have an answer.
She was tested in 1996, and was featured in a Star story about genetic testing.
Parker wanted women around the world to know their outcomes could change by being tested, so she wrote an as yet unpublished book – now the basis for the film's script – about her ordeal. Four years ago, a tumour was found behind Parker's liver. It was removed and chemotherapy followed.
Today, Parker is an advocate for genetic testing, and recommends it to anyone who has breast cancer in his or her family.
"I have come to the conclusion cancer is my life," she said. "I had to make the decision for the world, for other women. I want other people to know."