Sarah Parish sees acting jobs as break from charity work

Sarah Parish treats herself to a rest from her "full-time" charity work with acting jobs.

The 51-year-old actress set up The Murray Parish Trust to raise money for the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at Southampton General Hospital after her one-year-old daughter Ella-Jayne - who she shares with husband James Murray - died in 2009 of Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome, and she sees her role there as her day job.

Speaking to the Metro newspaper, she said: "It really helps knowing that we\'re helping sick children and it\'s a great legacy for Ella-Jayne. We\'re giving people hope in the worst time of their lives, which is great. It\'s also making something good out of something awful.

"We never expected to become this big or make so much money but it\'s a full-time job. When I do an acting job I can have a rest!"

The pair have been busy raising money for the trust to build a special paediatric unit for the South East of England.

Now, with the help of generous donations, Sarah and her husband are able to contribute more to the hospital with an MRI scanner suite.

She added: "We finished an appeal last year where we raised £5.2million with another charity and the government match-funded us, so we\'ve opened this beautiful, big emergency department for children.

"We immediately went in to another £5.5million campaign to build an MRI scanner suite. They\'re so important and I can\'t believe that every hospital doesn\'t have one."

Meanwhile, the couple previously announced they had reached their target of £2 million pound in two years after the British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe - CEO of the Ineos chemicals group and Britain\'s richest businessman - donated £500,000 to the charity.

Sarah said at the time: "We haven\'t been able to say until today who it was so we just want to say thank you to Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos for giving us that final push."