Natalie Cassidy: Life After EastEnders

It’s six months since EastEnders star Natalie Cassidy, who played Sonia Fowler in the hit soap, left Albert Square with trumpet in hand – but she says it feels final.

“It is lovely to just have a bit more time and not be chained to the schedule,” says the Islington-born actress and mother-of-two, who joined the soap at the age of 10.

“I really breathe a sigh of relief to just be able to go, ‘Oh, I can make that. I’m going to pencil that in for November. I’m going to make that for the children.’ For me, that is the biggest piece of freedom.”

Cassidy, 42, first appeared in Albert Square in 1993 and has been there on and off for 32 years (as both a Jackson and a Fowler), three quarters of her life, with her female mentors the late Dame Barbara Windsor and Wendy Richard giving her much help along the way.

“I remember seeing Barbara, this tiny, beautiful woman, a ball of fire, tottering around on her heels, but she was amazing about professionalism, knowing your lines and being on time. Punctuality is what I remember a lot about Barbara. You needed to be on your deathbed to not come to work.

“I think the advice I got from both of those women really helped me keep the job for a very long time.”

She relives many moments of her life in her new book Happy Days, from when she was plucked her out of Anna Scher’s acting classes in Islington to star as the trumpet-playing Sonia, recalling the hard graft, fame, laughter and tears behind the scenes.

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During her time on the show, she tackled storylines of affairs, feuds, bereavements, family problems, teenage pregnancy and a cancer scare. Fame soon followed as she was watched by millions of viewers every week.

Unlike some of her acting peers, she never went off the rails, which she puts down to her solid home life, hard-working ethic and love of the job she was doing. But there were periods of huge pressure, she recalls.

“There were times when my dad was really ill and living with me, I had a three-year-old daughter, full time work and I look back and don’t know (how I did it), but you just get on with it, don’t you?” she says.

She also became tabloid fodder, most notably during her on-off turbulent relationship with her then fiancé Adam Cottrell, a subject she won’t discuss, but also when she took a break from EastEnders in 2006 and did a fitness DVD, Natalie Cassidy’s Then & Now Workout, at the age of 23, which led to her being weight shamed.

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“It was a very bad decision because before doing it I was very unaware of weight, of diets. Of course, you dabble in the odd diet every now and again as a teenager. But I was very confident, very happy. I wore what I wanted.

“And then this job came up, and they go, ‘There’s £100,000, and we’ll get you really fit’. In three months I lost four stone, a ridiculous amount of weight, you sell the DVD, and then you’re left on your own.

“And I ate and ate, put it all back on. And so began this kind of tabloid journey of ‘really thin, really fat, she’s put all the weight on, she can’t cope’, and that sort of tabloid fodder began. I don’t think my metabolism has ever been the same.”

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She says she’s thick skinned and it wasn’t the tabloid attacks that affected her, but the shame of putting all the weight back on.

“Just people seeing you in general, friends and family, felt really horrible and I felt like I’d failed.”

She took laxatives to try to lose the weight, but not for long.

“It didn’t get that bad. I always say this because I’ve worked with eating disorder charities before and it was probably a little disordered eating, but I wouldn’t say that I got to a stage in which I had an eating disorder.

“But I think mentally, that DVD will never leave me. There are always times when I jump on the scales and think, ‘Oh, I need to lose a few pounds’. I’m very much aware of my weight.”

Her relationship with food is healthy now, she says, and she has been roughly the same weight for a long time although she is mindful of what she eats and wants to set her girls a healthy example.

“I love food. I love cooking. I love going out and buying food. I’ve just recently done Cooking With The Stars (she won the fifth series of the ITV show earlier this year), which I loved.”

Cassidy lives in Hertfordshire with fiancé Marc Humphreys, an EastEnders cameraman, and her children Eliza, 15, from her relationship with Cottrell, and Joanie, nine, with Humphreys.

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She has had periodic breaks from the show, taking up acting roles on BBC shows including Psychoville and Motherland, as well as appearances on popular reality shows such as Strictly Come Dancing and Celebrity Big Brother.

Brought up in a close-knit, loving working class family of five (she has two older brothers), her father Charles ran a newsagent’s, while her mother Evelyn was a housewife.

Life became difficult when her mother died suddenly from an aneurysm when Cassidy was 19 and she readily admits that her bad decisions over the next decade may have been fuelled by grief, loneliness and guilt that she hadn’t been around for her mother as much as she should have been.

It was during this period she had a turbulent relationship with Cottrell and admits that she didn’t always surround herself with true friends, and that she felt lonely after her mother’s death.

“I surrounded myself with whoever because I didn’t want to be lonely, even down to relationships that I chose. They were wrong because of loneliness, which is quite sad.

“And as much as there were brilliant times throughout all of that, I think that wanting love and wanting to be around people, I made some dodgy choices.”

As her father got older and suffered bouts of ill health, he lived with Cassidy for the last years of his life and she found she loved caring for him.

Her experience has sparked a 12-part BBC daytime documentary series Learning To Care, in which she trains and works alongside professionals, facing the realities, the heartbreak and the joy of caring, due to be broadcast next year.

She’ll also be doing some regional theatre shows pegged to her podcast Life With Nat later this year and would love to do more stage work. But has being best known as Sonia from EastEnders closed some doors for her?

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“For me, as much as everyone knows me as Sonia, people equally know me as Natalie, which is lovely as well,” she says. “So hopefully those doors are still around.

“I just want to be able to pay my bills, do nice things, be at home with the family and do nice bits. Listen, I could be eating kangaroo b******* in the jungle next year. I don’t know.”

She says in the book that her departure from EastEnders this time feels very final.

“I had a very strange feeling last Christmas when I was there, because I looked up at the tree and the square looked beautiful again and I really felt this is going to be my final Christmas here.

“But who knows? Never say never.”

Happy Days by Natalie Cassidy is published by HQ, priced £20. Available now.