'I am an optimist. I think, as bad as life sometimes gets, there is so much to joy': Amanda Holden opens up

As she adds the starring role of Princess Fiona in Shrek the Musical to her already extensive CV, Amanda Holden tells Jane Gordon about her career ambitions, her nicknames for Simon Cowell, her anti-ageing secrets and how she found true love with her very own Prince Charming

'Although what happened is obviously horrifying, we can go on to have more children,' says Amanda Holden about her recent loss

The adjective most often used in association with Amanda Holden in the past few months in no way matches the woman sitting across the table from me. The 40-year-old actress has repeatedly been described as ‘tragic’, but today the words that come to mind are strong, good-natured and, most particularly, professional.
Before our interview – her first since the stillbirth of her son in February, seven months into her pregnancy – she has gamely posed for photographers (at one point stretched out across a grand piano in London’s Criterion Restaurant) in her role as the ‘face’ of the newly launched TrimSole toning shoes.
Now, nursing a skinny latte, she is expertly deflecting sensitive questions (of which more later) and, instead, gleefully talking about everything from the horror of baring her feet (she hates her ‘sausage’ toes) to meeting David Cameron, in a stream of consciousness that is both endearing and entertaining.
‘David Cameron came up to me in the lift – this was before he was actually Prime Minister – and said, “Hello darling, we used to know each other.” Thankfully, I did remember him: he used to work at Carlton Television, and when I was in [the Caroline Quentin sitcom] Kiss Me Kate – about 1999, I think – he was one of the execs and he was always knocking around,’ she recalls.
Sharp, funny and honest (she can evade questions she doesn’t like but she’s far too open to lie), Amanda is undeniably multitalented. She can sing, she can dance, she can act, she can commentate (she was part of the American CBS network’s team at the Royal Wedding) and she can even, she reveals with a squeal of embarrassed laughter, break wind to music in her current role as Princess Fiona in the West End stage version of DreamWorks’ Shrek (where she’s part of a cast that also includes Nigel Lindsay as Shrek and Nigel Harman as Lord Farquaad).
Plus, I discover later in our interview, she can read upside-down. Glancing atmy handwritten notes, she points to No 25 (‘Twitter – 250,000 followers’) and informs me that she has ‘closer to 450,000 now’.

'I made the mistake of confessing on TV that I had had Botox once. Now I don't have it and if I ever had it again I would never mention it'

There is no doubt, too, that she is hugely ambitious (she would love a chat show, and hasn’t ruled out the possibility of following her friend Piers Morgan’s lead and transferring her career to the US), but ask her how she would define herself and she says, without hesitation, ‘Mummy first, then actress, then presenter.’
Born in Hampshire to Judith and Frank Holden, she is one of two daughters (her sister Debbie teaches scuba diving in Egypt) and was performing almost as soon as she could walk. When she was four her parents separated and she has had little contact with her natural father since (as she says, ‘he walked out when I was four, popped in once when I was six and sent me a present when I was 16’). Amanda credits her mother and her stepfather Leslie Collister (who raised her from the age of five and whom she thinks of as ‘Dad’) for encouraging her to believe that she ‘could achieve anything’.  

Amanda wearing TrimSole shoes

Her first television appearance was as a cheeky but unsuccessful 19-year-old contestant on Blind Date in 1991 that has been wrongly assumed to be her ‘break’ into acting. At the time she was a first-year drama student at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in North London, and it would be several more years – and minor roles in everything from EastEnders to Jonathan Creek – before she became an established actress in series such as Cutting It and Wild at Heart. But it was being chosen as the female judge on Britain’s Got Talent – alongside Piers Morgan (to whom she has become very close) and Simon Cowell – in 2007 that turned her into a household name and added another dimension (one that she clearly adores) to her career.
I tell her that a friend of a friend who was at drama college with her (whom she instantly and enthusiastically identifies) had told me that all the boys were crazy about her but she seemed genuinely unaware of her appeal, preferring to be ‘just one of the lads’.
It’s a comment that has been echoed by Simon Cowell (whom she says, very affectionately, she calls ‘God’ or ‘Darth Vader’ or just plain ‘Darth’), who has said that one of the things he likes best about her is that she is ‘one of the boys’. When I suggest that maybe this refusal to use or even acknowledge her looks (at one point she says she is ‘not in the same league’ as Dannii Minogue or Cheryl Cole) is part of the secret of her success, she reluctantly agrees.
‘Well, I certainly don’t think I would use my looks or anything like that to take advantage of any situation. I don’t know why, it’s just not in my nature. I have a really close network of girlfriends and we are all the same – very practical, no nonsense; none of us is a diva or high maintenance. Being financially independent is very important, too. I could never rely on a man for that. I couldn’t go out and spend the amount I spend on shoes if it wasn’t my money,’she says.
Amanda’s romantic history has not been without its difficulties – an early marriage to comedian Les Dennis and a subsequent affair with actor Neil Morrissey prompted a lot of bad publicity – but since she got together with music producer Chris Hughes in 2003 (they married in December 2008 with their daughter Lexi, then two, as bridesmaid) she has been blissfully happy. Indeed it is when she is talking about Chris and Lexi that she is at her most relaxed.
Amanda had been aware of Chris – and he of her – for years before they got together but, self-deprecating to the last, she thought he was too tall and handsome to ever consider going out with her. ‘Then I went to a fashion show during London Fashion Week in February 2003 and he said, “You are the prettiest girl in this room,” and I just said, “Bog off, don’t be stupid,” because I thought it was a line, but it wasn’t. And then we went out for dinner and it was a proper wooing, but we kept it under wraps.
‘He is amazing – how lucky am I? He’s so fit, I look at him all the time and say, “I can’t believe I am going out with you,” and he says, “You are not going out with me, you are married to me, Mandy,”’ she says laughing.
They live in a large house in Surrey with Lexi, now five, a ‘mixed race’ dog called Fudge, a siberian cat called Muffy and a garden with a bright green AstroTurf lawn. A vegetarian (although she cooks meat for Chris), Amanda is happiest at home slopping around in ‘TrimSoles and Juicy Couture tracksuits’.
She is, she says, the ‘least glamorous’ mother at the school gates. ‘Everyone looks amazing, I don’t know how they do it – I have even been known to do the school run in my jammies with a coat over them. But I always wear sunglasses because I don’t have time to put on eye make-up. I don’t think Lexi’s teacher had ever seen my eyes until last week at parents’ evening.’

Amanda with her husband Chris and daughter Lexi

There has been endless press speculation about Amanda’s youthful looks but she insists that she only had Botox once and that she could never have cosmetic surgery because of a skin condition. ‘I made the mistake of confessing on TV that I had had Botox once. Now I don’t have it and if I ever had it again I would never mention it. I wouldn’t be able to go under the knife because I have keloid-prone skin, which means that any intervention, and particularly surgery, would leave me with massive scars. So now I just look to the latest noninvasive treatments – Thermage is brilliant, or Fraxel. They are skin-cleansing procedures that keep your collagen alive and awake with no knives or needles.
In truth she has very girlish good looks that can – particularly when she isn’t wearing make-up – make her appear much younger than she is.
‘I have always looked young, that’s the thing. Just before Christmas I bought a bottle of Baileys in Tesco and the man asked me for ID. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Look, I am going to be 40 in two months, but I love you for asking!”’
Amanda doesn’t believe in diets and her enviably slim figure is due, she says, to the physical pressure of performing on stage in Shrek six days a week and, she quickly adds, the TrimSole leg-toning footwear that ‘is as effective as going to the gym’.
Her evident delight in motherhood (she doesn’t have nannies, relying instead on Chris and their families for childcare) is such that even after her recent loss – and an earlier miscarriage last year – she still hopes to have more children. ‘I am an optimist. I think, as bad as life sometimes gets, there is so much joy and so much good stuff that there is a balance. Although what happened is obviously horrifying, we can go on to have more children.’
She had been due to give birth in late March but in early February she became aware that the baby had not moved for 24 hours and she went into the West Middlesex hospital where she gave birth to a stillborn son.
‘I met the three midwives who looked after me through a documentary I made two years ago at the hospital and they are fantastic. They have gone on to become personal friends and they got Chris and me through the worst time of our lives. They went above and beyond the call of duty, both personally and professionally. I cannot thank them enough,’ she says. The experience has drawn Amanda even closer to Chris, who she describes as her ‘rock’.
‘We argue and bicker like all couples, and Chris calls me The Lip because he thinks I talk too much. But he is the love of my life and I am his and – how lucky – he is also my best friend, which is why we can get through anything. We are polar opposites. He is
very private, very closed, and I am pretty much an open book, but together it works. I always think we are like the plus and minus signs on a battery. It wouldn’t work without one or the other of us,’ she says.
Their main focus now is Lexi, who physically looks like a mix of the two of them but shares her mother’s character. Mother and daughter have a catchphrase, ‘Never give up’ (‘I say, “Never give up, Lexi”, and she says, “Never give up, Mama”’). They are a very tight unit and family life – like motherhood – comes first on Amanda’s list of things that define her.
‘Lexi does these hilarious impressions of me and Chris. For me she goes, “Hello, darling!” and for Daddy she goes, “Be careful, Bundle, be careful. It’s dangerous, Bundle”. Chris calls her Bundle. You can see the difference in our parenting – I am there saying, “Come on, darling, do it, jump a little higher”, and Daddy is always there to catch her.'