Goodbye Heartbreak
The actress, TV presenter, singer and dancer Denise Van Outen talks about moving on and turning the negatives in her life into positives.
Actress and TV presenter Denise Van Outen has never been one for sitting still for long.
There’s no pigeon-holing the one-time 90s ‘ladette’ party girl who made her name opposite Johnny Vaughan on The Big Breakfast and went on to play Roxie Hart in Chicago in both the West End and on Broadway, became a TV casting judge in talent show Any Dream Will Do and cosied up to (now ex) Eddie Boxshall in Celebrity Gogglebox.
Now she’s written her memoir, A Bit Of Me: From Basildon To Broadway And Back. She completed it during lockdown as she couldn’t bear just sitting around doing nothing, she says.
The book was delayed from last year while the 47-year-old actress, singer, dancer and presenter wrote an extra chapter on the reasons for her recent split from Boxshall after seven-and-a-half years together. But she is now determined to move forward.
“I’ve had a couple of very public breakups and for each one I’ve had, I’ve tried to turn a negative into a positive,” the former Strictly runner-up explains. “My lastreally public break-up was with Lee Mead, my daughter’s father. I took myself off and learned how to play golf. I immersed myself in it. It was escapism for me.
“In recent weeks, I’ve been learning how to work the discs so I can do some festival summer gigs this year. I try to learn a new skill just to have a focus and I think that also helps you to get through. I could write a book about heartbreak.”
BEING A PARENT
The book details previous relationships including her romance with Jamiroquai frontman Jay Kay and her six-year marriage to Casualty and Holby City star Mead. Does she think she’s been unlucky in love?
“No! I never try and look back and think I’ve been unlucky. Every relationship that I’ve had has brought something into my life and I’ve learned something through it,” she explains.
“I still have the most amazing relationship with Lee. He’s a brilliant father to my daughter, Betsy (now 11). We are really good friends, we’ve got each other’s backs. I totally respect his new relationship with his girlfriend, who’s lovely. We’ve got a really nice foundation for Betsy.
“It’s different to what other people have but what we’ve created between us I’m very proud of. We look out for each otherand it’s really quite special and unique and I value it a lot.”
Following her split from Boxshall, who she was planning to marry this year, she came off social media.
“In recent weeks, I came off Instagram for a month which was very healthy and I also just stopped reading the newspapers. I would only read the world news, keeping up to date with the terrible situation with the war in Ukraine.
“But any showbiz news I’ve stepped away from, just because you have to look after yourself.
“People have their opinions and that’s the thing with social media. People have always got something to say. They never know the full story.” Van Outen is keen to move forward now, but has learned from her relationship with Boxshall, she says.
“I think I’ve learned that going forward I need to maybe ask a few more questions at the start of a relationship, look at the past history and then decide.
“I had a wonderful seven-and-a-half years with him. I’m not going to complain about it. It was just obvious there were things happening behind my back I wasn’t aware of. But if I look back at the relationship and at the good bits, I had a lovely time.”
HANDLING REJECTION
Essex-born Van Outen has had her share of ups and downs but she’s learned resilience. Brought up by her mum, Kathy, a cleaner, and dad, Ted, a docker, she was always headstrong and confident, a girl who wanted to achieve.
She didn’t excel academically – her talents lay in more creative pursuits and, being the youngest of three, she grew up quickly. She went to dance lessons from the age of three and performed in her first
local musical aged six.
“At school, I’d lose focus. I was never diagnosed with having dyslexia or dyscalculia like my daughter has, but I can clearly see that I have those things which were never identified at school.”
A child model at the age of eight, Van Outen later joined the Sylvia Young – eater School – her peers included EastEnders actress Danniella Westbrook – and paid her way through school with the jobs she got in TV ads and pop videos.
“When I went for an audition as a kid, it wasn’t just about getting the job and getting four days out of school, it was more a case of, if I get this job I can stay for another term. ‑ at gave me a strong work ethic and drive which has carried me through. I’m still the same. Now I feel, if I get this job I can afford a new fence!
“I think I am quite tough. I had a lot of rejection as a child. It’s unusual for a child to go through that much rejection. When you model as a child or perform as a child and you’re constantly going up for work and you get told you’re either not good enough or not pretty enough, or you’re too tall, you have to learn to accept rejection quite well.
“But I still have a sensitive side and things do affect me. I just know how to process that rejection and how to move on from it quite quickly, because I’ve had it from such a young age,” she adds.
The partying days of her 20s, when she hung around with the likes of fellow ‘ladettes’ Jayne Middlemiss, Zoe Ball and Sara Cox, didn’t close doors on her career, she recalls.
“I wasn’t too wild to employ. I just had the persona of being a bit cheeky and maybe a bit mischievous.
“And after all these years, after all the hard work I’ve done, I hope I’ve gained a little respect with age. I’ve had a very consistent career.
A Bit Of Me: From Basildon To Broadway And Back by Denise Van Outen is available now.
“I can turn my hand to anything, which is what has kept me in work. Sylvia Young said to me, ‘You don’t have to be brilliant at everything but if you can do a bit of everything, you’ll always work’.”
Van Outen is a grafter. She’s had to work hard for success and writes in the book about things turning sour at The Big Breakfast, after a hugely happy period, when she discovered that Vaughan’s agents were negotiating a separate deal for him at Channel 4, which made her feel uncomfortable as she considered there might be differences in their pay grade.
“Imagine Ant going off and insisting he deserved more money than Dec. Well, that’s kind of how I felt,” she writes. She left the show soon after.
She never experienced any sexual harassment at work during her early fashion photoshoot days or any other point in her career, she says.
“If I’m in a group of men and if they say anything to me, I’ve got quite a quick wit and I think you can get the vibe that I’m a strong person. I could give a man a run for his money.”
She believes things have changed a lot for women in TV in the last 20 years. “A lot of women are the driving force behind a lot of TV shows now, which is great.”
She is working on a film called Sumotherhood alongside Ed Sheeran and is a judge on The Masked Singer Live tour in April.
There’s no chance she’ll be sitting still for long.
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