Cancer remains one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and the search for safe, selective, and affordable anticancer agents continues to drive pharmaceutical research. Medicinal plants represent a vast and largely untapped reservoir of structurally diverse bioactive compounds, several of which have already been translated into clinically approved chemotherapeutics, including the vinca alkaloids, taxanes, camptothecin derivatives, and podophyllotoxin analogues. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the isolation and characterization of plant-derived bioactive compounds and their development as anticancer drug candidates. We summarize conventional and emerging extraction techniques, chromatographic isolation strategies, and spectroscopic methods used for structural elucidation; describe the major phytochemical classes, alkaloids, flavonoids, phenolics, terpenoids, and saponins, and their molecular mechanisms of cytotoxicity; discuss translational approaches including nanotechnology-based delivery, plant biotechnology for scalable production, and computational drug discovery; and outline the remaining challenges and future directions for moving plant-derived anticancer leads from bench to bedside. A divergent radial workflow diagram and four summary tables are provided to consolidate the extraction-to-clinic pipeline for natural anticancer drug development.