Louise Redknapp on living apart from Jamie - and why she still loves him

The day I meet Louise Redknapp, the tabloid scandal surrounding her marriage to Jamie has reached fever pitch. ‘Divorced by Christmas’ the headlines scream, alongside photographs of the picture-perfect couple with their two sons, Charley and Beau  (now 13 and nine), ‘in happier times’.

When she nervously stepped out on to the Strictly Come Dancing studio floor exactly one year ago, few would have guessed the dramatic consequences that have turned her into one of the most talked-about women in Britain.

After years of standing in the shadow of her football-hero husband’s fame, Louise  – a former pop princess – has ripped up her meek and mild image to star as the decadent, drug-addled Sally Bowles in the latest stage production of Cabaret.

Extraordinarily, it is a move that may cost her her marriage (she gave up her career as  a performer when she became pregnant with her first child). Louise moved out of the family home within weeks of taking the part.

There is a sense in the media ballyhoo that somehow Louise has let us all down by throwing away every woman’s supposed happy-ever-after; moving out of her beautiful multimillion-pound Surrey home, ‘led astray’ by the likes of her ‘Strictly celebrity pals’, including Daisy Lowe.

According to the reports, her shell-shocked husband  of 19 years just wants her back at home.  But far from being the most explosive example of the Strictly ‘curse’ – which has so far claimed 10 relationships since the show began in 2004 – the story of Louise Redknapp is about a woman’s place in the 21st century. It is about confidence lost, confidence regained and a woman who reclaimed herself through the sparkles and sequins of Strictly.

A woman who made the decision that she no longer wanted to remain simply the ‘good wife’. Louise has said nothing, until now. We meet in the quaintly old-fashioned rooms of a church hall in Pimlico, London, where the final rehearsals for Rufus Norris’s (the artistic director of the National Theatre) Cabaret are taking place.

Louise is playing  the iconic Liza Minnelli role opposite Will Young’s grotesquely comic Emcee.  It is not a part anyone would have dreamt would go to Louise, whose wholesome image for the past two decades relied on her being distinctly unthreatening.

‘That’s exactly why I wanted to play a coke-snorting, mentally unstable, vulnerable, couldn’t-give-a-f—k sort of girl,’ she says.  ‘My first audition was on the day that the story about our marriage came out in the press. Jamie was with me. It was awful. That had been my whole life up until that point. But in a weird way it helped. Emotionally  I was all over the place. But I was also thinking, “It’s out there now. I have nothing left to lose.” And I just went for it.’

Today, she is wearing a pink sweatshirt and dance leggings. Her wedding and engagement rings remain firmly in place.  But even as she admits to being nervous about her first personal interview, it’s impossible not to notice a new confidence in her eyes and the way she behaves.

‘That’s the thing,’ she says with a smile.  ‘I feel I’m coming back to who I really am. I have spent most of my life pleasing everyone else, worrying about being judged and thinking I should always do the right thing  by staying at home, looking after my kids  and my husband. I lost myself.

‘I think this happens to a lot of women when they get married and have children. You have this feeling deep inside you, “Where did I go?” But I pushed those thoughts away.  ‘I’d think of my past life as a pop star as being “not reality”. Looking after the house and my family was my reality.

‘I became a sort of Stepford Wife,  wanting to be perfect at it. It was only  when I agreed to do Strictly Come Dancing [she was runner-up with partner Kevin Clifton in last year’s series] that I realised  I couldn’t just go back to that. I didn’t want to continue running around after everyone else, and occasionally promoting a yogurt or doing a little TV presenting job. I wanted to sing, I wanted to perform. I wanted to  go back to work on a stage in front of an audience. I actually felt physically sick at  the idea that I’d never have that buzz again, that fulfilment I get from performing.  And that is when the shit hit the fan. No one could understand why it was so desperately important to me.’

She does – after all – have the credentials.  At 11 she won a scholarship to the stage school, Italia Conti; at 16 she was chosen to be in a girl band, and by the age of 19 she had sold 10 million records worldwide with Eternal. After three years, she quit the band and went on to make five solo albums. She gave up her career when her first child, Charley, was born in 2004, six years after she married England ace Redknapp.

After being introduced by Robbie Williams in 1995, they were engaged within a week and married in three years. ‘Sport came first,’ she says. ‘Which was part of the reason I loved Jamie, because he had so much passion for what he did. I wanted to make him happy.’

A year into the marriage Louise was diagnosed with endometriosis, underwent laser surgery and spent four desperately painful years trying to become pregnant. It made her anxious and her confidence began to disappear.

In her two pregnancies (she gave birth to her younger son, Beau, in 2008) she suffered chloasma – facial pigmentation – which knocked her even more. ‘But I wanted kids so much, I was happy to put everything on hold for them.’

There is an honesty to Louise that allows her to admit how after two decades of being the perfect wife, she felt conflicted by her husband’s TV fame as he crossed from the pitch to presenting on Sky Sports and being a panellist on the game show A League of Their Own. ‘Standing by and watching Jamie become this entertainment star was pretty hard,’ she admits now.

‘I was proud of him, but there was part of me thinking, “that’s  my world”. I could see the excitement he got out of it and I knew how that felt. But  it wasn’t me feeling it any more.’ She describes her decision to take part in Strictly as ‘the first selfish thing I’d done since my kids were born’.

I ask her why she uses that word and she says, ‘I’d been asked to do it before but always said no because I’ve never missed one of the  kids’ matches, carol services, pick-ups, drop-offs or assemblies, as well as always being there to give them their dinner. I was about to turn them down again, but a friend of mine persuaded me to do it and – in a  really shallow way – I thought it would  help me lose a bit of weight. Jamie agreed  it would be a nice thing for me to do.’ (He also thought that once it was over they should try for a third baby.)

On the first show she stood right at the back, having insisted on wearing a gown that ‘went from my neck to my toes’. A few days later, the model Daisy Lowe barged into her dressing room as she was changing and said, ‘Oh my God, look at your gorgeous body. You have to wear a sexy dress.’

Louise – who holds the longest record of five years in the FHM Sexiest Woman in the World top 10 – says, ‘Daisy loves other women and she’s all about body confidence. Her saying that was like a jolt because I was so conscious of my fat ankles and my excess half-a-stone – Daisy is a tiny size eight.  She kept on at me to wear something sexy and by week three I was in a leotard and tights [for her top-scoring Flashdance routine] not feeling self-conscious at all. I could feel myself changing week by week.

‘I loved the dancing. I loved being pushed to see what I could do. I loved that incredible camaraderie, the laughs, the nerves, the excitement, the audience. Sometimes I felt like crying because deep down inside me this voice was screaming, “This is what I have been missing!”’

The idea that Daisy, 28, has been blamed for ‘leading Louise astray’ is dismissed with a shake of her head.

‘I’m a 42-year-old woman. Daisy is a mate who is an incredible cheerleader at a time when I’ve needed a lot of support. She’s a breath of fresh air because she has absolutely no filter. She completely believes in following your passion and fulfilling yourself as a woman, which I find really inspiring. We’ve started to do a podcast called Femme, talking about women’s issues. I love hearing all these different views from women, which makes me realise how controlled I’ve been about the way I thought about myself for so long.’

She pauses. ‘The thing was, I was always overly conscious of being judged. I cared too much about what people thought of me. But I wasn’t always like this. Something happened that made me stop being me.’

The secret lies in her past. Louise grew up  in a small flat in a tower block in Lewisham, south-east London, having never known her real father. ‘In the beginning it was just my mum [Lynne] and me. And from when I was very little I wanted to perform. My mum worked extra jobs to pay for dance lessons, singing lessons – even elocution lessons – because she believed in me.

‘And back then I was fearless. Completely fearless. I knew exactly what I wanted. We didn’t have any money, but I knew you could get a scholarship to Italia Conti and I was going to get one. There were 500 kids in the audition, nearly every one of them went on stage and sang Annie. I walked over to the pianist and said, “I’m doing Gloria Gaynor, I Will Survive.” And I got in.’

By then her mum had married a builder called Tim Nurding, who is father to Louise’s two stepbrothers, Jay and Sam, and who she considers her real dad.

‘When I got the place, the big panic was how the hell would I get all the way over to north London every day. I didn’t care. I told my mum I’d get up at 5am and walk if I had to. My best friend from Italia Conti remembers me walking in on my first day, with a blazer that was massively too big for me [so it would last a few years] and being super-confident saying, “Right then. Let’s go to dance class.”’

When she was 16, she was out clubbing when a guy – music producer Denis Ingoldsby – walked over to her and asked her if she could sing. ‘I smiled at him and said, “Hell, yes.” I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen. But I knew I just wanted in and that was the start of Eternal.’

Eternal made her name with their debut album, Always & Forever, in 1993 selling more than a million copies. But the gruelling schedule and the in-fighting between the four girls (‘we were very young and didn’t handle things well’) took its toll.

‘I wasn’t happy in Eternal. I learnt very  early on that being a pop star was a business. It was all about image, you had to play the game. There were highs and lows and you had very little control over any of it. When I’m playing Sally Bowles, I think of a few people I’ve come across in the music industry,’ Louise says.

This version of Cabaret is even deeper and darker than the Bob Fosse Hollywood classic, but Louise tells me, ‘I love Sally because she wears her heart on her sleeve. But she is completely selfish. She has an abortion and all she cares about is having  to sell her fur coat to pay for it. She’s a hot mess. I can put a lot of my emotions into that.’

Emotionally, Louise remains in a no man’s land. Despite the headlines, neither she nor her husband are pushing for a divorce. They are living apart but speak every day. She has also sat her two sons down. ‘I explained that it was important to do something in your life that made you happy. That I might miss a few school events. That I wouldn’t always be there to make their tea. They were both just like, “That’s OK, Mum, we get it.”’

She has no bad words to say about her husband. ‘It’s so hard because I love him. He’s an amazing man and we’ve had 20 good years together. I know he’s trying to understand that I do need to do this. People might look at me and think I’ve got everything, but a sweeping staircase and designer handbag doesn’t really do it for me.

'Being fulfilled, being true to yourself, following your passion, they are the things that make you happy. I have no idea what is going to happen, all I know is that I fought for this, it’s taken everything, but this is something I need to do – for me.’

‘Cabaret’ is currently on tour nationwide