![]() So the princess also has her own prince, too, but they’ve not had exactly had a fairytale year: a second child was due in March, but was stillborn a month before. And she only ever wants me to make her breakfast! Chris gets to stay in bed.”Ĭhris Hughes is Amanda’s second husband and Lexi’s father, who is a music executive. “I’m always up for that, there’s no choice – I always laugh when the kids in the show here say they’re so knackered – I say, try doing the school run! But I wouldn’t have it any other way – she is my priority. She is clearly a devoted mum and does the school run herself every morning. But Amanda missed seeing the show in New York because of her: “It was on but I never went to see it because I didn’t have her with me, and I thought I can’t – it would be like being unfaithful!” Lexi played a big part in Amanda’s decision to do the show at all: “The reason I even considered it was because of her – it’s a massive thing in our house, we have everything to do with Shrek”. “I’ve got a little bit of OCD,” she admits – “I brought my own Hoover, too.” There’s a picture of Amanda’s five-year-old daughter Lexi on the wall, with her cat Muffy “who she tortures regularly”, Amanda adds, and a corner of the dressing room is hers: “She often comes up here on a Sunday and plays in here”. ![]() And the TV princess that is Amanda is playing one, too: she is Princess Fiona in the Broadway stage musical version of Shrek that opens officially in the West End this week.Īmanda has had her dressing room custom designed by a designer friend called Tipp, who she knows from Norfolk where she has also has a house. And walking in, it’s true: she’s not only steam cleaned the carpets and disinfected the toilet (“well, John Barrowman had this dressing room once”, she quips straight away), but the room looks like it has come straight out of the pages of a fairytale. The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane may be the West End’s most prestigious musical theatre, but backstage there’s a typically scruffy jumble of corridors and corners.Ī cold stone staircase leads to one of the star dressing rooms, currently being occupied by Amanda Holden with a sign posted outside it revealing that a princess is in her tower. Mark Shenton meets Amanda Holden as she returns to the West End as one of the stars of Shrek the Musical. I’m happy to finally be able to publish it here - nearly ten years on, but better late than never! When I filed the interview, the editor refused to run it: she’d been withholding, he said. At one point in the interview, Holden told me that Simon Cowell was so open he’d answer any question at all, and I considered, for a moment, seeing if she would, too, but then thought better of it: a miscarriage is a very traumatic event for a woman, and I’m sure she wouldn’t want to go to this painful place again. Instead, she waited outside - and listened at the door. On the day, the PR concerned escorted me to her dressing room, and was going to join us, except she’d not agreed this in advance, so I told her I’d rather she didn’t. I told him I’d been told that this was specifically out of bounds, as the PR had told me this already but he insisted I should try, as I was bound to charm her. I begin with an interview I conducted with Amanda Holden, as she was about to star in the West End in Shrek in 2011 that was commissioned for the Sunday Express.īut ahead of going to the interview, the paper’s then-editor Martin Townsend called me and excitedly instructed me to quiz her about her recent miscarriage. ![]() Starting today, I’m going to publish (or re-publish) columns, interviews and reviews I’ve written in the past.
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