Her relationship with Gallagher and subsequent marriage, in 1997, was feverishly tracked by the tabloid press. The week they were due to wed, the couple woke up to find The Big Breakfast broadcasting on the street below, with presenters parading girls in wedding dresses while speculating on what Kensit would wear on the day itself. They were forced to cancel the wedding, eventually marrying in secret a couple of months later at 7am one morning at Marylebone Town Hall.

How did she cope with that level of intrusion? “Elton John told me I needed to stop reading the papers in the early 1990s,” she says. “So I did.” Still, the cruelty of the coverage was surely hard to ignore. The tabloids never took her acting career seriously – she was respected much more in America, Italy and France – and were particularly unpleasant about her weight.

In previous interviews, she has said she doesn’t recognise the person she used to be – or was painted as being. Despite the 1990s mythology of up-all-night hedonism, she insists that she and Gallagher spent many an evening in front of the TV eating bowls of spaghetti hoops. “There were a few pictures taken of me in the 1990s, looking upset, or kicking a car door in [following an infamous row with Gallagher],” she says. “I think the press had established this fragile, needy person – this image of someone who was almost everything I wasn’t. 

“All that [weight-shaming] stuff in the papers – I didn’t look at it. I didn’t read it. It’s as though they had this fictional character in their heads, and it was very difficult for them to rewrite the truth.”

Except, Kensit today does sometimes come across as fragile. She is honest on Instagram about the days when she feels low and, in 2024, was diagnosed with PTSD. You suspect she has never really got over her mother’s death. “I think I went on Pilgrimage with quite a bit of anger,” she says. “Yet during the walk, there was this garden which had a maze in it, and there was the most beautiful white, pristine feather at the centre of the maze. All my life, white feathers have made me think of my mum, and so I picked it up, and I felt all this heat in my hands, and I found my way out of the maze.”

But there is also a side to her that is tenacious and disciplined. “I’ve always turned up to work on time, and I’ve always been the consummate professional. If I were that socialite person [that everyone thought I was], you’d see tragic pictures of me turning up at anything. And that’s just not the case. Not because I’m too good for it, or that I think, ‘Oh, that’s below me.’ It’s just I’m terrible with small talk, and I find it stressful.”

In Pilgrimage, she jokes more than once that the programme has forced her to come out of her shell. Yet when I ask her about this, she dismisses the idea that she might have found spending five days and nights with six strangers a challenge. “You just get on with it. It baffles me that people think I would have found that hard. Making movies isn’t glamorous anymore, and you muck in, and you get on with things. That’s what I’ve always done.”

She has maintained her acting career, with stints in Holby City and EastEnders alongside Strictly Come Dancing, and the odd film and TV appearance. She adores her two sons, one of whom, Lennon, is now a model (Kensit regularly posts images of him and her backstage at shows).

At the end of the Noughties, she was briefly married to the DJ, Jeremy Healey, and in 2024, broke off her engagement to the property tycoon, Patric Cassidy. Questions about her private life today are off the table.

Being Patsy Kensit, it seems, is not always easy. How is life now? “Very boring! One of my sons is staying with me at the moment, so all I am doing is the washing. But it’s good, it’s good. I am allowed to feel happy.”

‘Pilgrimage: The Road to Holy Island’ is on BBC Two on April 5 at 9pm.