Amanda Holden: ‘I like to be a little bit shocking’
Amanda Holden is showing me where a human female’s nipples should normally be found. ‘They are not here,’ the Britain’s Got Talent judge explains, stabbing at the centre of her chest with a perfectly manicured nail, ‘are they?’ So when 235 viewers contacted Ofcom to complain about her low-cut navy Celia Kritharioti gown during the semi-final of the ITV show last month, claiming to be able to see Amanda’s nipples, ‘I was really quite insulted! I mean they would have had to be either in the middle of my cleavage, or the size of saucepans – which they’re not.’
It’s all faux outrage, of course. I know this, not because of the wild cackle of laughter that follows her anatomy lesson, but because she’s been a friend of mine for 15 years. In public, private and in the handful of times I’ve interviewed the 49-year-old over that time, I’ve enjoyed watching her play the end-of-the-pier pin-up role that suits her so well.
She racked up so many Ofcom complaints during the latest season of BGT, ‘the producers had to start doing a “tit test” before the show – and, by the way, they absolutely put that blue dress through. But you know,’ she whispers, ‘I like to be a little bit shocking.’
But beyond the saucy roles and routines is a side of Amanda that can sometimes be forgotten. It was talent and decades of hard graft that propelled the Portsmouth-born schoolgirl from playing a fairy in a Bishop’s Waltham pantomime to starring in the BBC sitcom Kiss Me Kate in the late 1990s and ITV drama Wild at Heart (2006-2008), and to the West End stage, where she was nominated for an Olivier Award for her 2003 role in Thoroughly Modern Millie. It’s dedication that’s kept her on our TVs as a judge on BGT for 13 series and allowed her to transition to Heart FM breakfast host last year, where she kept the nation’s spirits up over lockdown.
‘It felt like such an honour to be in people’s houses throughout that time,’ she says, freakishly perky (despite her 5.15am wake-up call for a Heart FM stint). But there’s another, surprising, reason she loves radio. ‘I’ve always known how I might be perceived in terms of how I look. But in England I do think that sometimes goes against you – that you must necessarily not be funny or clever.’ And radio took her looks out of the equation? ‘Exactly. I think people just hearing my voice got to know the real me.’
It’s the female catch-22. Are we allowed to enjoy the make-up, the dressing up, the sexiness and the glamour while hoping we won’t be reduced to that? And something about Amanda has always attracted criticism. I had women tell me they felt annoyed by her bikini-clad, rosé-soaked Instagram feed during lockdown. ‘I really didn’t care that people said I was showing off. Social media isn’t there for you to hide behind your bushel – if you still have one,’ she adds. ‘So I just embraced it and saw myself as the Vera Lynn of TikTok – God rest her soul. And I feel like I can do more of that as I get older, because it’s less showy-offy when you’re nearly 50,’ she reasons, her theory being that age punctures conceit. Like Gwyneth’s naked birthday picture? ‘She looked fabulous – and she’s 48! So it’ll be a full spread when she’s 50: top-shelf readers’ wives material.’
Ask Amanda what her two daughters, Lexie, 14, and Hollie, eight, think of her skimpy outfits, and she assures me they’re the least of the girls’ concerns. ‘What really annoys them is that I’m naked at home. Last night I went to say goodnight to Lexie wearing only my shower cap and she screamed, “Mum! I’m on FaceTime! Why do you always have to be naked?”’ But she hopes her body confidence will rub off on them. ‘It’s so hard for girls now, and if Lexie ever starts a sentence with, “Do you think I look f…”, I cut her off with, “Do not even say that word in my house.”’
As well as running four times a week and sticking to a healthy vegetarian diet (‘but not dieting: I believe in being able to have that slice of cake’), Amanda has a few ruses that help her stay confident. ‘As a woman, I have always shared sneaky things I do in terms of creams or covering roots, but at the moment I’m in a position where I can be honest, because I haven’t had surgery. When I do – because I probably will – I don’t know whether I will tell people I have. But I think women are allowed a bit of mystery, aren’t they?’
Perhaps because singing was her first love, all joking is dropped when we start to discuss her latest move into music. Perched at a safe social distance on my sofa, Amanda looks uncharacteristically vulnerable when she explains why it took her so long to make the album, Songs From My Heart. After a fierce bidding war, she was finally signed by the long-time president of Virgin EMI, Ted Cockle, for a cool £1 million – and as I write the album is number one on iTunes. ‘I suppose I didn’t think I would have been taken seriously if I had decided to do this before now.’
Having grown up listening to Big Band, Elaine Paige and Barbara Dixon, a musical theatre theme was the obvious choice, and Songs From My Heart – created with Amanda’s music-producer husband Chris Hughes – is crammed full of favourites such as Over the Rainbow (released as an NHS charity single in May), I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables, Sweeney Todd’s Not While I’m Around, the heartbreaking With You from Ghost, and a duet with Sheridan Smith, I Know Him So Well from Chess. Making the album with Chris, her second husband – her first marriage, to comedian Les Dennis in 1995, lasted seven years – has brought the pair closer than ever. ‘It’s been really sexy seeing him come into his own and say things like, “The drums are too loud on this track,”’ she grins.
The message behind the songs, however, is a sober one – and deeply personal: ‘The songs are about the ups and downs of being a mum.’ Which could make her experiences of motherhood sound like any other woman’s, but for me brings back memories of sitting in a shady LA back garden with her in 2011, listening to her recount in unbearable detail how the ‘boisterous boy’ she’d carried for seven months had died in her womb. How, dosed up on morphine and having lost enough blood to necessitate a transfusion, she was asked if she wanted to hold the baby they had already named Theo. ‘And I held him and he was perfect. There was nothing wrong with him at all.’ How ‘honoured’ she felt ‘to have carried him and looked after him as long as I did’.
‘With You is for Theo,’ she tells me now. ‘But also for Chris, who was there for me and stayed strong when I fell apart.’ Because it wasn’t just the grief she had to endure, but ‘a total loss of faith in my own body. After Theo, I felt my body had let me down. I didn’t know whether I could try again’. The friendship and support of three midwives – Jackie Nash, Pippa Nightingale and Natalie Carter – Amanda had befriended while making her ITV documentary about midwifery, Out of My Depth, in 2009, was crucial to her recovery, as were sessions with a hypnotherapist recommended by the fertility specialist Zita West.
‘People are very different,’ she points out when we discuss the harrowing photographs Chrissy Teigen and John Legend posted on Instagram earlier this month, hours after losing their baby at 22 weeks, ‘and I feel for them both as the worst is yet to come, when the enormity of what happened really hits them. But I did find talking about it really helped and I hope my openness will resonate with the people who have lost babies. I just don’t want them to be frightened of the words. I say the words “dead baby” – two of the worst words in any language – and I consider myself lucky to have had the support that I did.’
With the aim of ensuring all women who suffer the same loss are able to have support, Amanda set up a fund, Theo’s Hope, via the baby charity Tommy’s, in 2018, to help provide special bereavement counsellors at all UK maternity units. Today, having ‘raised the amount of money we wanted to’, she tells me the fund will ‘have a special focus on BAME women, who research tells us are more likely to lose babies in the way I did, and culturally can be in greater need of support’.
Although Amanda did manage to get pregnant again with Hollie in the summer of 2011, she was forced to go through another ordeal when she began to haemorrhage during the birth and went into a four-day coma. ‘I say to people that I’d be dead if it weren’t for the NHS. I’m always surprised when people say to me, “God you’ve been really unlucky,” because I never think that. I just see what has happened to me as a series of things that I need to get to the other side of.’
As the eldest of two girls raised in a single-parent household after her naval officer father left when she was just four, she is ‘grateful’ for the stepfather who was willing to take on their ready-made family – and has called him her father ever since. She will send her birth father a Christmas card, she says, ‘and he sends the girls birthday cards’, but that is the limit of their relationship now. ‘He has his own life and I think he found happiness in the end, so I’m pleased for him. There’s no resentment – just sadness for him, really, and for the family I don’t know.’
Amanda is ‘grateful’ too that she was ‘allowed to pursue what I really wanted to do. As a family they really encouraged me.’ And it was her grandmother, Ethel, – an accountant in a Wall’s Ice Cream factory – who instilled in her the work ethic she has today. ‘I didn’t expect to get the BGT job, which was life-changing. And I couldn’t believe I got an album deal at 48 years old. But nobody has worked harder than me. And if it all went wrong tomorrow, I would go and get a job: I would clean, I would do anything to make sure I could continue to have a good life.’
Last year, Amanda’s £3 million deal with Heart made her Britain’s highest-paid female star on air. I ask her what she thinks of her BBC counterpart, Zoë Ball, reportedly requesting a pay cut after growing ‘uncomfortable’ with the £1 million raise she received last year. ‘I wonder if it was more to do with working for the BBC,’ Amanda muses. ‘If she’d been working for ITV, she might have accepted the cheque. And yes, I do feel that Alesha and I should be paid the same as Simon Cowell and David Walliams. Because why is their value higher than ours? I don’t understand it. I know what they bring to the show, but we all bring something, and I think we’ve now proven that the jigsaw doesn’t work with a piece missing.’
As one of her mentors, Simon was the first to hear the album, and the pair spent an awkward hour listening to it in his London sitting room last year. ‘I went bright red as it played, but obviously I badly needed his affirmation, and he was really nice. Which was so unlike him!’ She hasn’t been able to get to LA to visit him because of Covid, ‘but I do miss him’.
Amanda’s London lockdown may have been enjoyable, but the idea of being forced to cancel her 50th birthday party in February – when she was planning to invite close friends, such as actors Angela Griffin, Tamzin Outhwaite and Lisa Faulkner, to ‘a big castle in Scotland’ – is depressing, she admits. ‘I wanted a three-day event where we could drink copious amounts and throw welly boots.’
In itself, however, the idea of turning 50 is no cause for sadness. ‘I don’t feel old, I don’t feel like it’s the “autumn” of my life. Instead I feel like all these green shoots are sprouting. And I’ll never be made to feel ashamed of being “ambitious” as a woman. Ambition is my life blood, my energy. It’s what has pulled me through – and I don’t ever intend to sit still.’
‘Songs From My Heart’ is out now
