This-
Interview 2006
I hate myself for being fat. No wonder I'm in therapy
by REBECCA HARDY, Daily Mail - More by this author » Last updated at 10:54am on 17th August 2006
Nadia Sawalha should be happy as a lark. But she's gloomy about being 12st 7lb and would prefer to be 10st. 'I hate every single day being the weight I am,' she says. 'I feel unattractive.'
'I find it crippling. It affects my relationships — affects everything. I've spent my whole life hating the way I look.
'I used to be perfectly slim, but thought I was fat. Now I am fat I realise that I was actually all right before. I've been through every diet in the book, but the thing is I eat to make myself feel better.'
To listen to Nadia, you'd think she was gargantuan and miserable. She shouldn't be. Not only does she have the husband (TV director Mark Adderley) and the child (three-year-old Maddie), but she also has a great job as a presenter on the new BBC1 early evening show, The One Show.
'I've worn myself out trying to be fantastically happy all the time. It's really draining and exhausting pretending. So I'm trying not to pretend any more,' she says.
Despite this, she punctuates such confessions with loud, raucous laughter, even when there's little to laugh at. The problem with Nadia, according to her therapist — she's been in therapy for a year now — is that she tries too hard to be happy and nice.
'I go to therapy because life is a bit mad when you realise you've been people-pleasing all your life and you've chosen a job to please people,' she says. 'It becomes really exhausting being nice all the time.'
Nadia, who found fame as the not-so-nice Annie Palmer in the BBC soap EastEnders, is 41. She hopes her therapist will help her deal with her guilt, her ego, her insecurity, her tendency towards control freak-ism — and, of course, her weight.
Nine years ago, her first husband, out-of-work musician Justin Mildwater, hanged himself on Christmas Day — ten days after she 2000 fell for her EastEnders co-star Marc Bannerman. To this day Nadia refuses to speak in detail about this period in her life.
Her relationship with Bannerman, who played her on-screen lover Gianni di Marco, ended three years later when she met — and later married — Mark Adderley during the filming of the dating show Perfect Partners.
She is wary of talking about her first marriage. In the past, she has said: 'I've been burnt so many times. I was upset for a long, long time.'
But what of Bannerman?
'I can hardly remember him,' she says. 'It was a relationship that just did its time.
'I thought I was in love, but I now realise that all my relationships before my second husband were about my insecurity and wanting someone needier than me so I could keep up the pretence of being in control.
'When I met Mark, I was older, wiser, and wanting to have a real relationship. Mark and I are great mates. Some people find it easier to say "I love you" than "I like you" — and I really, really like my husband, but I'm also in love with him.'
Do they ever fall out?
'Oh, I wouldn't be with anyone I couldn't have an argument with,' she says.
'We fight like any couple.'
I suspect those rows are louder and more dramatic than most, because everything with Nadia is on a huge scale. She's 'exhaustingly nice' one minute, but foaming at the mouth the next.
I make the mistake of asking about the time when she fell out with her younger sister, actress Julia (of Absolutely Fabulous fame), when Julia was dating Jonathan Creek actor Alan Davies.
'I don't want to talk about that,' Nadia says. 'It's all such a load of bloody rubbish — it's just that I didn't like that man.
'Julia and I are closer than ever. There was a falling-out with Alan Davies. But he and Julia are no longer together — which is brilliant.'
Nadia, the middle daughter of actor Nadim Sawalha, the son of a Jordanian Bedouin tribesman, and mother, Bobbie, from Surrey, was born — appropriately — to the accompaniment of wailing as part of an Arabic custom.
'My sister Dina is two years older than me,' she says. 'Each time my mother had another daughter, they'd bring in professional wailers because it was such a disaster that there was no boy.
'Of course, now they're hugely proud of us, although my mother never comments on what I do because she's almost a bit embarrassed about our success.'
Nadia's parents live in a flat attached to her house in South London. Dina, who is an artist, lives next door with her two sons, aged seven and 16.
Dina was the shy child while Nadia was the big, exotic brunette and the show-off. When Julia, who is four years younger, was born, Nadia was sent to live with her grandparents for three weeks because she became so clingy.
'My mum freaked out,' she says. 'Dina and I were so close. We even had our own language. Then there was poor Julia, always trying to get in with us and we were always pushing her out — teasing her.
'We used to roll her up in a mattress and pretend we were going to throw her down the stairs. It's only in the last couple of years I've listened to her and realised how horrid it was for her.'
Nadia says they were indulged as children with few boundaries.
'My parents let us do whatever we wanted. I was adored as a child. Everybody used to say "Here's Nadia" and I'd be singing or dancing. I loved the attention.
'When I wanted to go to stage school, I told my parents: "You have to let me or I'll throw myself out of the window." Within days they allowed me to audition for the Italia Conte drama school and I got in.'
Nadia's contemporaries were Bonnie Langford and Lena Zavaroni. She remembers lots of mirrors and an obsession with weight.
'On the Arab side of my family, all the women struggled with their weight, so it was something I heard about from the age of three or four.
'They'd come to the house and the first thing they'd say was: "Have you put on weight?"'
On top of that were the huge, frequent feasts in the Sawalha home.
'The comfort was in the kitchen — in beautiful meals and freshly baked bread. Mum never let us have chocolates or cakes, which I now think was wrong because those treats became secretive. As soon as Dina and I got money, we used to buy a bag of sweets and hide in our bedrooms to eat them.
'That's how my secret comfort-eating started — something I'm trying to sort out in my therapy.'
Nadia left Italia Conti at 15. 'I was a strange child,' she says. 'I was starting to be rebellious at school. I wanted to get out in the world.'
She travelled for a year before returning to work as an usherette at the National Theatre where, at the age of 17, she met her first boyfriend who was training to be an actor.
'Because I'm flirtatious and big-boobed, I look like I would get about a bit. But I'm very moralistic. I've never had a one-night stand. I've only ever had five relationships.'
Nadia didn't find success as an actress until the age of 32. She struggled to make ends meet selling Moroccan scarves on a market and worked as a waitress in Pizza Hut. To rub salt into the wound, her sister Julia was already a star.
'I was intimidated by her success,' says Nadia. 'I was frightened of it because she was younger. In the early days, I would go on a job and people would call me Julia. I would laugh it off, but inside it was hurtful. And that's why it was so wonderful when I got into EastEnders.'
By then she had been married to her first husband Justin for nearly four years, but within a few months of her appearing on the soap, they separated. A month later, he committed suicide.
Her relationship with co-star Marc Bannerman became public knowledge a few weeks after Justin's death, but when she left EastEnders in 2000 — determined, she said, to have children — their relationship foundered.
She says she was attracted to her present husband Mark, who is five years her junior, because he was 'a grown-up'. She adds: 'He felt like somebody who could look after me.'
Within four months of their first meeting, she was pregnant. She insists the baby was planned and Mark proposed on Valentine's Day in a note sent with some flowers.
They married in June — all within a whirlwind five months. Nadia says, with a completely straight face, that they are both 'impulsive'.
She returned to work three weeks after giving birth to Maddie — but husband, child and job didn't make her sufficiently happy, so she decided upon therapy.
She also thought having more children would help, but sadly she's miscarried twice this year — at 11 weeks and then, six months later, at six weeks.
'If I didn't have Maddie, I'd be in a really bad way,' she says. 'I decided to see the therapist because I was reading self-help books and knew I was on a treadmill.
'I wasn't depressed, but I do get tired, stressed out and insecure — like every woman in the world.
'I also wanted to be a better mother. I had a baby and didn't know what to do and was trying to mix that with work, guilt and not wanting to feel guilty. I feel guilty all the time.'
Not least about her weight. As I leave, Nadia tells me that she is nervous about her new TV show and a forthcoming photoshoot — because she's 'so fat'.
She says her daughters find them really embarrassing and in the next breath says she is doing it for her daughters. No, you are doing it to feed your addiction and desperation for exposure and attention. Full stop. Seeing their mum in these photos is not helping her daughters to have better body image...
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