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.<\/p>\n
How did she cope with that level of intrusion? \u201cElton John told me I needed to stop reading the papers in the early 1990s,\u201d she says. \u201cSo I did.\u201d Still, the cruelty of the coverage was surely hard to ignore. The tabloids never took her acting career seriously \u2013 she was respected much more in America, Italy and France \u2013 and were particularly unpleasant about her weight.<\/p>\n
In previous interviews, she has said she doesn\u2019t recognise the person she used to be \u2013 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. \u201cThere were a few pictures taken of me in the 1990s, looking upset, or kicking a car door in [following an infamous row with Gallagher],\u201d she says. \u201cI think the press had established this fragile, needy person \u2013 this image of someone who was almost everything I wasn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAll that [weight-shaming] stuff in the papers \u2013 I didn\u2019t look at it. I didn\u2019t read it. It\u2019s as though they had this fictional character in their heads, and it was very difficult for them to rewrite the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s death. \u201cI think I went on Pilgrimage with quite a bit of anger,\u201d she says. \u201cYet 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
But there is also a side to her that is tenacious and disciplined. \u201cI\u2019ve always turned up to work on time, and I\u2019ve always been the consummate professional. If I were that socialite person [that everyone thought I was], you\u2019d see tragic pictures of me turning up at anything. And that\u2019s just not the case. Not because I\u2019m too good for it, or that I think, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s below me.\u2019 It\u2019s just I\u2019m terrible with small talk, and I find it stressful.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cYou just get on with it. It baffles me that people think I would have found that hard. Making movies isn\u2019t glamorous anymore, and you muck in, and you get on with things. That\u2019s what I\u2019ve always done.\u201d<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Being Patsy Kensit, it seems, is not always easy. How is life now? \u201cVery boring! One of my sons is staying with me at the moment, so all I am doing is the washing. But it\u2019s good, it\u2019s good. I am allowed to feel happy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Pilgrimage: The Road to Holy Island\u2019 is on BBC Two on April 5 at 9pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Her relationship with Gallagher and subsequent marriage, in 1997, was feverishly tracked by the tabloid press. The week…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497923,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[243,61079,6491,5343,96,175193,27157,5438,3133,167224,58919,56,54,55,157732],"class_list":["post-497922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-bbc","tag-catholicism","tag-celebrities","tag-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-patsy-kensit","tag-religion","tag-standard","tag-television","tag-television-editors-choice","tag-top-story","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-us-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}