Daughter of beloved British actress dies suddenly at 27 while studying at Columbia University

Beau Jessup, the 27-year-old daughter of British actress and former Loose Women panelist Lisa Maxwell, has died while enrolled as a master's student at Columbia Journalism School. The school announced her death in a statement posted on its website on Monday, Nov. 9, saying it mourned the loss of Jessup, a student in its M.S. program expected to graduate in May 2027. No details surrounding her death have been released.

Columbia Journalism School said it was working with Jessup's family to offer support and assistance. With permission from the family and encouragement from peers and leaders at the school, Columbia News published an interview conducted with Jessup in October as part of its Notebook series highlighting students. In that interview, Jessup discussed her path to journalism, her time at Columbia, and her plans after graduation.

Jessup told Columbia News she chose journalism after growing up as the daughter of a television actress, which gave her "an unusual awareness of the distance between people's lives and the stories told about them." She said she saw how journalism could illuminate experiences but also how those experiences could be "distorted, simplified, or transformed into a public narrative over which the subject had very little control." She hoped to work as a journalist reporting on people and culture and to "ask social questions with the rigor I'm learning at Columbia."

Jessup previously earned a Master's in Writing for Performance from the University of Cambridge and wrote her first play, The Sandbag, which she described as interrogating "how family, memory, the body, and inherited narratives shape the stories we tell about ourselves." She was born in October 1999 to Maxwell, 62, and Paul Jessup.

Maxwell, known for her role on The Bill and as a former panelist on the U.K. talk show Loose Women, spoke to PEOPLE in 2008 about motherhood and watching Beau grow up. "As she's growing up, she's become more of a little mate to me," Maxwell said at the time. "We have so much fun together, and I'm constantly amazed by all the new things she's learning to do."