The love that GB and I shared was an intense, deep love – we were lovers, but we were best friends too. We talked about everything and never stopped laughing. Mum said I should have been ‘sowing my oats’, but I’ve always been a relationship girl. I don’t remember it was particularly about sex, though obviously we had sex because we spent an awful lot of time in bed. There’s a funny story attached to this. Very early on in the relationship, after doing the deed, I came downstairs in agony. GB was cooking tea – I specifically remember it was boil-in-the-bag cod fillets in parsley sauce (we knew how to live!) – but before we ate, I started to complain of chronic tummy pain. Within minutes I was doubled up and we called an ambulance. When they arrived, they took one look at me and said it was suspected peritonitis, a potentially fatal inflammation of the abdomen. Terrified, GB and I were whizzed to hospital, sirens blazing. They rushed me into A&E, after which a doctor examined me and gave me peppermint water. Then I farted, which must have lasted five minutes. I’ve never felt so embarrassed in my life, with GB by my bedside mopping my brow while I stank the ward out. After that episode, we both knew it was true love, and never tried that particular position again!
Of course, we shared a joint passion for acting and we were both very focused on doing well at college. Charles Lamb and Terry Clark ran a tight ship at the Jellicoe Theatre in Bournemouth and it was an excellent course. Our curriculum didn’t just include performing – we learned every aspect of theatre such as lighting and sound. We put on our own productions and took turns to manage rehearsals and do sound checks, or to be stage managers. I enjoyed it all and I knew it would be great experience for my future career, but it never even crossed my mind to stay behind the scenes! In the event it was GB, not me, who made the first move towards a professional career in the theatre. Just before he graduated, he auditioned for the famous Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London – one of the leading drama schools in the country – and was accepted. I couldn’t have been happier for him: it was a tough school to get into and I was so proud.
It meant a huge change for us, as I still had a year to go at Bournemouth, but we vowed to see each other as many weekends as budget and National Express coach timetables allowed. For the next year, I’d either go to see GB or send him the money from my job to come home and see me. Our days together were so important. I lived for the weekends, and whenever GB came back, I came back to life. One day one of the girls in my house double-dared me to ride around the block naked on the back of her motorbike, which was like a red rag to a bull. No one turns down a double dare! Laughing, GB agreed to take me but insisted I at least wear a crash helmet. I pressed myself up against his back and squealed with excitement as he raced me naked around the block – I even waved to the doorman at the Chase Manhattan Bank and shouted, ‘Say no to crack!’ It was the easiest twenty quid I’ve ever earned.
With GB gone, it was now my turn to see if I could get into drama school. I applied to LAMDA, the Central School of Speech and Drama and Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in Wood Green, north London. Mountview was much more commercial than GB’s school but it had a great reputation. I had to save up the £50 for the audition from my weekend job. Thousands of people apply every year, so it was a massive deal.
The end of my course approached and as I waited to hear if my applications had been successful, I moved back home for a while. Every day, I’d wait for the post with mounting anticipation. One day, I was upstairs being chambermaid, changing beds in the attic bedroom, when I heard my mum coming up the stairs. As I peered out of the bedroom door, I could see she was ceremoniously carrying a letter on a cushion. It was THE letter from Mountview. We looked at each other nervously.
‘This is it. This is the big moment,’ she said, and we sat down on the bed together. Fingers fumbling a little, I opened the envelope and skim-read the letter, heart pounding. Finally, I read the words I’d dreamed of seeing. I was in! I’d been accepted at Mountview theatre school. That was such a special moment – a life-changer. The next important stage in realising my dreams.
It wasn’t long before my euphoric bubble was burst. One weekend shortly afterwards, a friend had a party and GB came home for it. We all ventured down to the beach that night and went skinny-dipping. I was late going down and the others had all gone ahead. I’ll never forget, I followed in my dressing gown, with a cup of tea in a china cup and saucer! As I walked down the street, I heard rustling in the bushes in the next-door neighbour’s garden. I turned to look and a South African girl I was friendly with at college appeared, adjusting her dress. Close behind her was GB – my GB. They walked down to the party, hand in hand, without seeing me. It felt so surreal standing there in that dark street, in only a dressing gown, naked underneath, holding a cup of tea. You couldn’t make it up. I could almost see myself and how ridiculous I must look.
To say I was heartbroken would be an understatement. I was wrecked beyond belief. I confronted them both and went absolutely nuts, screaming and fighting with GB. He denied it all, of course, but later my friend Andy was brave enough to tell me that GB had been having an affair with her for weeks. Every time I had paid for GB’s coach fare home, he’d been visiting her as well.
After I’d got over the initial shock, I asked Andy to drive me to the coach station and I went to London, to GB’s bedsit, and wreaked havoc. I tore up photographs and ripped up tapes and totally trashed the place. When I was finished, I found his flatmate Matthew in the Drama Centre’s canteen and he confessed that he too knew all about the affair, which came as a double blow. I felt bereaved and betrayed. All our friends were there, trying to find out what was wrong, but I was inconsolable.
GB arrived home later that night and thought he’d been burgled, but then he looked around at what had been damaged and it dawned on him what must have happened. When Matthew and I got back to the flat, we could just hear this animalistic howling. It was GB. He took me for a long walk on Primrose Hill to apologise and he promised that it would never happen again. I was young and so much in love that I desperately wanted to believe him. Girls now know all about self-respect and how you should deal with that kind of situation, but I didn’t know any of that. I was so naïve, and just desperately in love with him, and so I forgave him. We kissed and made up and, in a much happier frame of mind, I returned to Bournemouth.
A few days later, GB proposed to me over the phone by saying, ‘Maybe we should get married.’ I had no doubts whatsoever. When we next saw each other, he took me to the jeweller H. Samuel and we chose a Ceylon sapphire ring surrounded by tiny diamonds, and he proposed again, properly, on Primrose Hill.
Even though I was still only nineteen, my family weren’t at all surprised – they liked GB and knew how much I loved him. His family embraced the news just as warmly as mine and his mum threw us a small party at her house in Leeds, with champagne and a cake. I had never felt happier. When I went to cut the cake, though, I accidentally sliced through the top of my finger. There was blood everywhere but I didn’t really feel the pain – I was busy trying not to see it as a bad omen. GB’s brother was a doctor at Leeds General Infirmary, so on what should have been a celebratory night he whisked me into hospital, stitched up the wound and went to get me some painkillers.
All of a sudden, the curtain to my cubicle drew back and Jimmy Savile was standing in front of me! At that point, he was still regarded as a legendary fundraiser and philanthropist. He looked at my bandaged hand and made a lame joke about me attempting suicide. I was completely taken aback. Then he asked me, ‘Have you got any gynaecological problems?’
‘No,’ I said, thinking it was a bit bizarre.
He gave me a weird smile. ‘Then I can give you one!’
Knowing what we know now, it was a seedy thing to say to me, but I dined out on that ‘Jimmy Savile is a perv’ story for years. (The rumours even when I was nineteen were that he’d slept with a fourteen-year-old – why no one did anything about it, I have no idea.)
Every morning on t
he bus to drama school I travelled past a bridal shop called Mirror Mirror in Crouch End. As the bus pulled to a stop outside, I’d peer into the window, imagining myself in the fairy-tale outfit I’d always dreamed of. It was early summer of 1990, Madonna was dominating the charts with ‘Vogue’ and I was starting out at drama school. GB, Matthew and I moved into a basement flat in Primrose Hill. (Although my drama school was in Wood Green and all my friends lived in Turnpike Lane, there was absolutely no way that I wasn’t going to live in the nicest location I could, so I decided to work Saturdays and Sundays to live the dream!) I barely gave Bournemouth a backwards glance.
Living with my boyfriend on Gloucester Avenue turned me into a right little homemaker. I cooked and filled the place with candles and Laura Ashley cushions. I was so happy, and determined to make it work. Financially, it was tough, though – way tougher than I could have imagined. Mum and Dad were doing a bit better and could help me out with extra money and things – they always said we never had any toilet paper in the house! – but I was still skint. I remember I would have £5 for a week, which would do for my packed lunch every day and my bus fare, but I was always borrowing the odd pound for a jacket potato. I had a pair of navy blue canvas wedge shoes that I wore every day – they would be sodden in the winter and all crusty and dried up in the summer, but they saw me through a year of my course! I had a job at Hobbs for a while (when I got lots of shoes half price!) but it got to a point where it was affecting what I was doing – when I was meant to be learning lines and going out and contacting agents, I was working and trying to keep my life together instead. (I did treat myself to a bottle of Lambrusco every now and again, though. I’d make up some tagliatelle and packet béchamel sauce, sit on the floor, drink two glasses of Lambrusco and watch thirtysomething. I loved that show. GB used to sit in the back yard because he couldn’t bear me crying at it every week!)
School itself was even more demanding than my last. At Mountview I felt like a minnow in a sea of sharks, surrounded by naked ambition, and it made me bashful and self-conscious. Once again I found myself fighting to be the loudest and became a total lovey. (Mum recently found a postcard I sent them from there that reads: ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy, sorry I haven’t written for ages but I have been working and have met a smashing group of people!’ That kind of sums it up . . . )
My two best friends from this era are Jason Maddocks and Jane Wall. Jane reminded me when I was writing this book of how she first saw me standing on a table in the canteen wearing a white dress and singing (‘either a show tune or an Abba song’ – I do love an Abba song!), like something out of Fame. She took one look at me and thought, ‘I could never be friends with someone like that.’ I think she just wanted to slap me. Thankfully we became very close and we are still best friends twenty-three years later.
Jason, however, says he heard me before he saw me, because of my ‘outrageous raucous laugh’ and liked my filthy sense of humour. He was often picked as my love interest in the plays we did together, which was hilarious as he came out to me as gay even before he told his parents. (We only found out later that it was Jason’s place I’d taken at Bournemouth and Poole College, when he’d dropped out at the last minute to remain in the sixth form, and for that I owe him.) Jason became my flatmate, and knows me better than almost anyone. He says back then I came across as confident, ambitious and driven, but he knew how self-conscious I was inside and he constantly tried to instil confidence in me. On the opening night of Thoroughly Modern Millie in 2003, he said, ‘If there was one person at drama school who was going to make it, we all thought it’d be you.’ That meant the world to me.
The ethos at Mountview was tough love. The teachers liked to break their students and put them back together again. We had to be strictly disciplined, but most of all we had to learn to believe in ourselves. I usually avoided conflict but sometimes I fought back, particularly against a teacher who had no structure to his classes and was especially difficult. He had us doing free-form dancing, including what he called ‘riding the tiger’ which basically involved him watching us dry-hump the floor! He picked on people and singled out one girl who’d just lost her father, beating a drum and making her cry. He was a bully, and I couldn’t stand it.
One day, me and the girls had had enough. At my house, we drank a litre of water each and every time we had a sip we cursed him. We then all pissed into a jug and added this to an Evian bottle. (I even added some Bloo to make it look less green.) The morning of his class my girlfriends distracted him and I swapped his water bottle for the piss bottle, my heart thumping. We sat in the circle, talking the usual drama school bollocks about finding yourself and your ‘centre’, while me and the girls never took our eyes off his bag. Sadly he never drank it on our watch, but I live in hope that all that drum beating built up some thirst in his next class.
Whatever happened with the curse, his bullying got worse, and I drew up a petition demanding that he be kicked out of the school. Everyone in the school signed it, but then panicked and wanted their names scrubbed out when he found out what was going on. I refused and instead handed the petition in to the principal. Eventually, he left and we found out that he had been sacked from several other schools for bullying. Rumour had it he was part of some weird cult, but we never did find out which one . . .
Like all the other students, my chief ambition at Mountview was to earn my Equity card – it was the be-all and end-all of our lives at that point. The fuller your CV, the better it looked, so I tried all aspects of performance art. I even put a group together in which my friend Sally Walker played the piano and I sang. (I wanted to call it Salamander – get it? – but she wasn’t so keen.) Instead, it was called B Sharp. We used to say, ‘B Sharp – book now!’ We did gigs all over the UK (including all the hotels in my mum’s street) and a couple of weddings to earn points for our cards.
During the summer holidays, I went back to Bournemouth and worked at my parents’ guest house. Chase Lodge was doing really well. By this time, Debbie had also moved out and the main house was full of guests – all eleven bedrooms. I loved waitressing, and I didn’t mind the cleaning either – Mum would leave all the bathrooms and toilets for me because I loved doing them! GB came back with me too that year, so Mum put a double bed in the shed for us to sleep in. It was comfier than it sounds, and warm (I only seem to remember gorgeous sunny summers in Bournemouth then!).
In September, I changed courses. I’d originally enrolled in Musical Theatre. Most of the girls had danced their whole lives, wore full make-up and dressed in unitards most of the time (I didn’t even have a pair of leg warmers!). I wanted to dance and do musicals, but first and foremost I wanted to be an actor. I wrote to the college principal and said I don’t think it’s for me. Can I go on to the acting course please? I switched, and Jason followed suit.
It was much more my scene and for two years I was really happy. A few of my friends were into smoking spliffs, but that was never my thing. I hated the taste so much that a friend bought me some honey-roasted tobacco which she claimed would be gentler on my throat. She even blew the smoke in my face, but I always ended up coughing and wheezing like an old tramp. I hated it and didn’t see the point – I never inhaled enough to get high! Increasingly, though, GB was never home. I used to wander out into the street and walk up to Chalk Farm tube station in my pyjamas, worrying about where he was. (This was before mobile phones, remember, so I couldn’t just send him a text to find out.) I must have looked pretty tragic standing in Primrose Hill in my PJs. I knew it was ridiculous waiting for him like that but I couldn’t help myself; I loved him so much.
There was another boy at college who I was very fond of. He was handsome and fun, and could tell that things weren’t right between me and GB. One weekend, back in Bournemouth, he invited me for a walk along the seafront and asked me if I’d consider going out with him instead. He kissed me and was so sweet. I was flattered and grateful. In other circumstances I might have been tempted but I thanked him
and told him no. He smiled and told me, ‘GB’s a lucky man.’ I knew in my heart GB didn’t think that at all.
Trying not to worry about my fiancé, I threw myself into my studies and was given some amazing parts in my final year, including the best yet – the role of Roxie in Chicago. I was also in an Anthony Minghella play called A Little Like Drowning. Mr Minghella lived in Crouch End, not far from the college, and came to see the play in person. Afterwards, he came backstage and told us what a good job we’d done. He said it was moving and subtle. I was awestruck. He made me believe I really did have a future in the business.
Alongside all the acting, I had my first brush with light entertainment. GB’s best friend Ian had just been chucked by his girlfriend. During the summer, in August, we saw a sign for auditions for Blind Date, and as a laugh I went with him. Of course, I ended up auditioning and was the stupid loud one who got through, and he didn’t. I had a boyfriend, GB – which I stated on the application form – but was still called to be on the reserve list. In the end, somebody’s granny died and I was called to London to take part in a show. (It’s still available to see on YouTube, should you wish!) Funnily enough, this has become the ‘before I was famous’ clip that has come back to haunt me over and over again. It was good fun and I loved the show, but it’s not, as so many people think, the moment that I was ‘discovered’. Afterwards, I went back to drama school and continued to train. (Before I was rejected I’d told Cilla that my dream date was Jack Nicholson because I preferred ‘mature, experienced men’. In truth, I loved Jack because he was such a great actor. I’d seen him in Terms of Endearment on my thirteenth birthday and he made me laugh and cry. But instead that night I announced to some 17 million Blind Date viewers that I preferred ‘mature men’. I had no idea how that would come back to haunt me too . . . )
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