{"id":96774,"date":"2025-10-22T10:32:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T10:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/96774\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T10:32:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T10:32:08","slug":"natalie-cassidy-on-eating-issues-eastenders-and-life-since-she-left-the-soap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/96774\/","title":{"rendered":"Natalie Cassidy on eating issues, EastEnders, and life since she left the soap\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s six months since EastEnders star Natalie Cassidy, who played Sonia Fowler in the hit soap, left Albert Square with trumpet in hand \u2013 but she says it feels final.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is lovely to just have a bit more time and not be chained to the schedule,\u201d says the Islington-born actress and mother-of-two, who joined the soap at the age of 10.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really breathe a sigh of relief to just be able to go, \u2018Oh, I can make that. I\u2019m going to pencil that in for November. I\u2019m going to make that for the children.\u2019 For me, that is the biggest piece of freedom.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0She relives many moments of her life in her new book Happy Days, from when she was plucked her out of Anna Scher\u2019s acting classes in Islington to star as the trumpet-playing Sonia, recalling the hard graft, fame, laughter and tears behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere 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\u2019t know [how I did it], but you just get on with it, don\u2019t you?\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\"CassidyCassidy in 2001 with fellow actresses Patsy Palmer (EastEnders) and Tracy Shaw (Coronation Street). Picture: Alamy\/PA<\/p>\n

She also became tabloid fodder, most notably during her on-off turbulent relationship with her then fianc\u00e9 Adam Cottrell, a subject she won\u2019t discuss, but also when she took a break from EastEnders in 2006 and did a fitness DVD, Natalie Cassidy\u2019s Then & Now Workout, at the age of 23, which led to her being weight shamed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt 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, \u2018There\u2019s \u00a3100,000, and we\u2019ll get you really fit\u2019. In three months I lost four stone, a ridiculous amount of weight, you sell the DVD, and then you\u2019re left on your own.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I ate and ate, put it all back on. And so began this kind of tabloid journey of \u2018really thin, really fat, she\u2019s put all the weight on, she can\u2019t cope\u2019, and that sort of tabloid fodder began. I don\u2019t think my metabolism has ever been the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0She says she\u2019s thick-skinned and it wasn\u2019t the tabloid attacks that affected her, but the shame of putting all the weight back on.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust people seeing you in general, friends and family, felt really horrible and I felt like I\u2019d failed.\u201d She took laxatives to try to lose the weight, but not for long.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt didn\u2019t get that bad. I always say this because I\u2019ve worked with eating disorder charities before and it was probably a little disordered eating, but I wouldn\u2019t say that I got to a stage in which I had an eating disorder.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I think mentally, that DVD will never leave me. There are always times when I jump on the scales and think, \u2018Oh, I need to lose a few pounds\u2019. I\u2019m very much aware of my weight.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love food. I love cooking. I love going out and buying food. I\u2019ve just recently done Cooking With The Stars (she won the fifth series of the ITV show earlier this year), which I loved.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cassidy lives in Hertfordshire with fianc\u00e9 Marc Humphreys, an EastEnders cameraman, and her children Eliza, 15, from her relationship with Cottrell, and Joanie, nine, with Humphreys.<\/p>\n

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.\n <\/p>\n

\"HappyHappy Days, by Natalie Cassidy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brought up in a close-knit, loving working class family of five (she has two older brothers), her father Charles ran a newsagent\u2019s, while her mother Evelyn was a housewife.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t been around for her mother as much as she should have been.<\/p>\n

It was during this period she had a turbulent relationship with Cottrell and admits that she didn\u2019t always surround herself with true friends, and that she felt lonely after her mother\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

\u201cI surrounded myself with whoever because I didn\u2019t 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

She\u2019ll 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?<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, as much as everyone knows me as Sonia, people equally know me as Natalie, which is lovely as well,\u201d she says. \u201cSo 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 bollocks in the jungle next year. I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0She says in the book that her departure from EastEnders this time feels very final. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0Happy Days by Natalie Cassidy is published by HQ, priced \u00a320. Available now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s six months since EastEnders star Natalie Cassidy, who played Sonia Fowler in the hit soap, left Albert…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,6405,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-96774","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-music-movies-reviews-munster","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}