Martine McCutcheon

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'I love with all my heart and cry with all my heart,'
Martine McCutcheon goes back to soap
By JUDITH WOODS
28 December 2007

People who up to now have just been milling about, drinking coffee and staring out of the window are locked in embrace, laughing with giddy delight as a beaming Martine, 31, cuddles everyone in sight. Then it's my turn. When I limply suggest that she might like to reserve my hug until after the interview, she gasps in horror at the idea and, pulling me to her pert embonpoint, adds a kiss on my cheek for good measure.

She's dressed in a bizarre but fetching Pirates of the Caribbean ensemble of black long johns, battered brown boots, a Topshop faux-vintage frilly petticoat skirt, and a snug Nicole Farhi waistcoat that gives her a tiny Betty Boop waist. Around her neck is a tribal Missoni necklace, and her wrists rattle with a mix of gaudy high-street bangles and unequivocally classy (ie, discreetly tiny and real) diamonds.

I can only assume that the ex-EastEnders star's swashbuckling chic has got something to do with her recent filming on the coast of Cornwall. After a period out of the limelight ? other than an appearance in a recent Tesco advert ? Martine is once again on the crest of a wave, starring alongside Jason Donovan and Hugo Speer in Echo Beach, a new 12-part ITV drama by one of the writers of Life on Mars.

In an ingenious new format, each episode will be preceded by Moving Wallpaper, a behind-the-scenes comedy (in which Martine plays herself) about the making of Echo Beach. In the soap, Martine plays Susan Penwarden, a woman with a shadowy past. "It was challenging because I usually play characters who are quite happy and true to themselves. Susan is repressed and, unlike me, doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve," says Martine. "Soaps and television are what I know and love, so this role feels like coming home. It's like stepping into a pair of comfy slippers, but decorated with rhinestones."

Paste jewels? Surely after all her years in the business she can afford the real deal? Martine smiles engagingly, "Oh yes, I can, and I love nice things ? I consider Ralph Lauren sheets to be a necessity, not a luxury ? but I've known what it's like to be poor. [Martine's mum had three jobs just to make ends meet.] I always take care of my stuff. I adore Julien Macdonald,Valentino, Chanel and Balenciaga. But even if I only spend a small amount, I'm so nouveau riche that as long as something is beautifully wrapped, I get a huge thrill."

We talk as her make-up is applied, and I have to hand it to Martine, she never stops speaking once ? even, impressively, during the lip gloss application. Gradually her improbably long-lashed Bambi brown eyes are ringed in smoky kohl. At the end, when this smouldering glamourpuss peeps into the mirror, she gasps in such un-starry wonder at her transformation that everyone's laughing in transports of giddy delight again.

'I adore the heady buzz of courtship, but the thing I've learnt is that sometimes love isn't enough'

Martine's tale is not quite as simple as that of East End rags to EastEnders riches, for it includes a conspicuous fall from grace (her notoriously short-lived run in the stage production of My Fair Lady) followed by another roller-coaster high (starring in Richard Curtis's film Love Actually) then yet another low (a failed move to Hollywood). Martine's life is itself the stuff of soap opera, graced with a surreal cameo appearance from Liza Minnelli and spiced up by a series of spectacular crash-and-burn romances.

There was the engagement to DJ Gareth Cooke who kissed and told, the fling with EastEnders co-star Paul Nicholls, and she was linked with Simply Red singer Mick Hucknall, in the course of which she famously vomited into his dreadlocks (what a cheer went up when we women learned of that one!). Not to mention the relationship with would-be film producer Jonathan Barnham; despite their difficult break-up, she still stood £75,000 bail for him when he was charged with being part of a £30 million drug-smuggling racket, and visited him in prison when he was convicted.

She's still friends 'with anyone I've ever truly loved', so it's fair to say that Martine is not a girl to bear a grudge, despite her tangles with Kylie Minogue's ex, James Gooding (another kiss and teller) and a relationship with property developer James Tanner (another love rat).

"I adore the first heady buzz of courtship, and if I'd simply been in love with being in love I'd have married already several times over, but I suppose the thing I've learnt is that sometimes love isn't enough," she says. "The acting profession is very hedonistic and there's so much raw emotion, perhaps that's why I love with all my heart and cry with all my heart. But, at 31, I look back and I'm glad I went for it and have known both emotions."

Martine always gives everything her best shot, to the point, those close to her say, of perfectionism. She was the cockney scholarship girl at the Italia Conti stage school who found fame as salt-of-the-earth EastEnders barmaid Tiffany. She left after four years to pursue a music career that began promisingly with the number-one hit "Perfect Moment" and a well-received first album; her second album got to number 25, but her third bombed, and Martine and her record company went their separate ways.

Then another cockney girl, Eliza Doolittle, came to her aid when Martine was cast in the 2001 London stage production of My Fair Lady. But despite being showered with accolades for her "bloomin' luvverly" stage presence (she was applauded for her comic timing and scooped a Laurence Olivier Award), Martine was dogged with such ill-health that her understudy appeared in more performances than she did, and she was forced for medical reasons to leave the run five months early.

"I was devastated when the press implied I was shirking," she says. "Nobody gained from the situation; the more often I was on stage the more bums there were on seats and the better for business and for my career. Being on stage is what I lived for, and I spent nights weeping my eyes out because I wasn't in any state to perform. I know now that the muscles in your voice need to be trained for stamina. Mine needed to be built up for a marathon rather than a sprint, and singing soprano night after night just proved too much."

After leaving the show, Martine admits she almost fell to pieces with exhaustion. "I was burned out. I'd been working since I was 14; then I had a pop career and was forced to grow up in the glare of the media, having all my major heartaches very publicly. In many ways I was running away from myself by seeing the next role as a distraction from a failed relationship or the pressure I felt to give a little bit of myself to everyone. When I took on My Fair Lady I was ready for the challenge in my head, but my body simply packed in."

Shaken by the backlash, Martine withdrew from the limelight and took stock. Her instinct was to run to her mother, Jenny Tomlin, 51, who now lives in France with her husband, Alan, 41, and Martine's stepbrother, Lawrence, 16. Mother and daughter are very close, partly because Jenny had always been at pains to compensate for the behaviour of Martine's abusive, drug-addled father, who was an erratic, frightening presence during her childhood, showing her little affection.

"I didn't have a good relationship with my dad, and I think my career was partly a result of me wanting to show that I was lovable and all the other barking reasons why people go into the business. I had such a wonderful relationship with my mother that, ironically, it gave me a false sense of security, making me believe that everyone would be lovely to me, which I've learnt the hard way isn't the case."

A rather nice twist in the story came one evening when, in a nightclub, Martine was introduced to Liza Minnelli, who had much admired her performance as Eliza Doolittle. Liza gave Martine a rousing 'you were born to perform' pep talk. "Her words had a huge effect on me," says Martine. "It was as though she was giving me permission to appreciate the things I'd achieved, and I'm so grateful."

In a fitting footnote, Martine went on to become one of Minnelli's bridesmaids in her short-lived marriage to David Gest. Then, after a professional lull, came another reprise of Martine's London girl, this time one from Wandsworth, in Love Actually with Hugh Grant. It was supposed to launch a Hollywood career, but it didn't work out as planned.

"After Love Actually I went to the States and the press here said that I upset a lot of people in Los Angeles when the opposite was true," she says with a shrug.

"I won an MTV movie award for Love Actually and landed a major role in a pilot show, but it was put on hold by NBC for a year, which left me treading water and missing what I felt were great opportunities for me in Britain. Working In LA was what I'd always wanted, but I missed my family and friends, and although I was sad that things didn't work out, it meant I could come home."

Martine, who possesses a genuine sweetness alongside her determination to succeed, emanates honesty and openness ? but no longer to the point of self-destruction. When I ask her about her current love life, she happily volunteers, "Yes, I'm dating someone at the moment and I'm really happy, but for once I'm not shouting it from the rooftops."

I ask if her new beau is handsome. "I think he's really cute," comes the reply, but when I gently press her further, her doe-eyed gaze implores me to stop. "Please, with my track record, give us a chance!" she shrieks. But she does let slip that although she isn't broody just yet, she'd 'like to have the choice' about whether to start a family in a few years' time.

In the meantime, her career is on the up again. This summer she was filming Jump! with Patrick Swayze in Vienna, a 1920s drama about the Jewish celebrity photographer Philippe Halsman. Now that the filming of Echo Beach has ended, she's renting a penthouse flat with views over Wimbledon, but is on the hunt for a place to buy in Central London, with a parking space for her black Mini convertible, which she calls Raven.

"I'm a Taurean, so I'm very passionate and determined and materialistic. Down the years I've spent a lot of money and saved a bit of money and had a lot of fun. And, yes, if it all ended tomorrow and I could never afford another Gucci bag, then I think it's safe to say that I've got enough to be going on with."

Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach will be shown on ITV1 in January

[Kezza]

I must admit that I'm looking forward to "Echo Beach". Love Hugo Speer!

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Derision greets Martine McCutcheon novel
Former EastEnders star McCutcheon has published the first chapter of her debut novel
By Jonathan Harwood
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 1, 2009
thefirstpost.co.uk

Former EastEnders actress and pop star Martine McCutcheon has turned her hand to literature. The first chapter of her debut novel The Mistress has been posted online by publishers MacMillan - and has been greeted with much mirth.

The story begins with heroine Mandy - who sounds remarkably like McCutcheon with her "ebony" hair, "flawless skin" and "big brown eyes" - preparing for a night out to celebrate her 30th birthday. The opening stanzas offer a startling insight into Mandy's philosophy and spheres of reference. She uses a copy of Grazia to shelter from the rain and - while driving past the Natural History Museum, Harrods and the Lanesborough Hotel - ruminates on how "exhilarating" London life can be.

McCutcheon explains the attraction of the capital: "If you went for it, truly went for it, you could get the life you wanted here, and that was Mandy's aim - to have it all. And why not? She'd read a greeting on a card once in Paperchase on the King's Road that had truly stuck with her: Reach for the moon, and even if you miss, you'll land among the stars. She loved it and used it as a mental pick-me-up whenever she felt low."

The website Anorak describes McCutcheon's opus as "a work of parody that should make the nation's satirists hang their heads in envy and snap their pencils in two".

McCutcheon made her name as cockney sparrow Tiffany in the soap opera EastEnders in the 1990s before she embarked on a shortlived pop career. She then took the role of Eliza Doolittle in a stage production of My Fair Lady and won the award for best actress in a musical at the 2002 Laurence Olivier Awards. There would seem to be more than a hint of Doolittle and Tiffany in the prose style.

McCutcheon has also released a fitness DVD and made the jump to film, starring in Love Actually and opposite Patrick Swayze in the 2007 film Jump! It remains to be seen how well her latest venture fares and if she can emulate another female author who has overcome critical opprobrium - Katie Price, aka glamour model Jordan, who has sold millions of copies of her three autobiographies, three ghostwritten novels and a number of children's books.

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Interview: Martine McCutcheon, actress and author
Martine McCutcheon has turned her hand to writing her first novel, but has the fame and glamour she once craved passed her by?
03 November 2009
By Catherine Deveney

IT WOULD be easy to scoff at actress Martine McCutcheon's debut novel, The Mistress but we mustn't. Well okay – if you twist my arm, maybe just a little bit. The opening chapter sees the heroine, Mandy, celebrating her birthday with friends in a restaurant. Mandy is high-voltage: a bright, bubbly 30-something who really reminds you of someone. (Ooh, I think it's Martine, actually.) Here's a short extract. "Mandy… felt she was being watched intently, to the point that it caused a burning sensation to the side of her head." Oh dear… have the cake candles set her hair on fire? Tragedy. But no, it's the (married) stranger of her dreams looking at her longingly across the room that's causing all the smouldering. It's that kind of romantic novel. A bit like cheap chocolate: you know you should really get something better, but it has a kind of fatal fascination that keeps you nibbling.

A London bistro, rain-spattered windows. Will Martine turn up? The ex-EastEnders actress, ex-pop singer, ex-West End musical star (that's a lot of exes – she's good at reinvention) has cancelled once already. And she wanted copy approval but didn't get it. "Oh she's a monkey, that Martine," a PR in the city has told me. Never worked with her, the PR admits. Simply knows the diva reputation. Monkey is not a bad word, not damning. Bit show-offy, monkeys, but engaging too. A cab draws up. Martine, with her black coat and shiny black hair tied back, jumps out, running out of the rain to the doorway. She's fresh faced and attractive and there's something very pert and confident about her. She's warm and open and on a high because the taxi driver has just been really, really nice to her about her acting and singing. Martine loves to be loved.

She's like a character in her own romantic fairy tale. Deprived childhood… emotional struggle… triumph. As a child, only a scholarship and grants allow her to attend the Italia Conti stage school. Then there's a brief, ill-fated period in a girl band. According to her autobiography, she doesn't like the fact that there's more interest in one of her fellow band member's voice than hers. She likes to be the centre of attention. Anyway, she ends up working in Knickerbox, and when her agent calls her about an EastEnders audition she's not sure she wants it because she wants to be a glamorous star in furs and frocks, not a soap actress in some dreary, market-veg saga.

But Martine wins the role of Tiffany, and Tiff is the kind of Cockney rough diamond guaranteed to win the hearts of soap-loving Britain. Suddenly Martine achieves the kind of fame she always dreamt of. She never made any secret of the fact that she was ambitious. "I'm not sure people warm to that, though," she says now. A successful but ultimately short-lived pop career followed EastEnders, but it was when Richard Curtis gave her a leading role in the 2003 film Love Actually, opposite Hugh Grant, that her career really looked as though it might rocket. She was finally going where her heart had always been: glamorous Hollywood. Then… well, nothing really. Now the actress-turned-singer turns writer. What's going on?

McCutcheon's favourite meal tells you a lot about her. It's a buffet. "I think that says everything about me. If I don't want it, I don't have to have it. And I don't have to have all of it. I can have a little bit of that and a little bit of that and a little bit of that." It has been her approach to her career too. She wishes it was still like the old days of Hollywood, when you had to act and dance and sing. "I don't think for a second that I'm the best at anything but I know I'm really good at quite a lot of things because I work hard. I don't want to be one thing. I want to be whoever I want to be."

Creating an image is an important part of McCutcheon's personality. Interestingly, it doesn't come across entirely as affectation. It's almost like a child playing Cinderella, someone desperate to replace grim reality with fragrant fantasy. Even the affair at the centre of her novel is a less-than-ideal love that becomes completely stylised. It's all designer labels, extravagant presents, weekends in Paris and sheer physical indulgence. You might think it a bit empty if you didn't know McCutcheon's background. That side of her story has been well told: her turbulent childhood, running from a physically and emotionally abusive father who dangled her over a balcony as a baby in order to force his estranged wife to have sex with him. The girl who turned to dreams of showbusiness to lift her out of the reality of a life where the only security was the absolute devotion of her mother's love.

Does she use luxury as protection, to convince herself the old life is gone forever? "I'm a Taurean, and we're famous for loving lovely things. For me, it's a big thing to have beautiful sheets on my bed and real perfume. I need them. Even if I had been born in the biggest manor in the world, I think it's something I would love and enjoy." But has she worked out the influence of her childhood on that? "I don't think I'll ever work myself out, but I enjoy trying. I want to make my mum's life and my life safe. I think when you're young and have nothing and come from an abusive background, when you look at things that are glossy and expensive and lush, it all looks very safe. It's a massive part of who I am. I like that about myself."

There's safety, too, in public recognition, which perhaps accounts for the slight grandiosity she has about her own fame. When she says that she has never been a mistress, it's partly because "fame is a big responsibility". "It's something that could have happened, I think, if I hadn't had to be so responsible so young. You have to take into consideration the fact that there's a public out there who aspire (sic] to you and who, from a business point of view, buy into who you are and what you do and what you believe in. People were saying I was a national treasure, and I didn't think it would be right for the national treasure to go running off with a married man."

How bizarre not only to be part of a tabloid agenda about 'national treasures' but to actually believe it. But maybe that's because role models were once very important to McCutcheon herself.

The idea for her novel – which started as an outline for a TV series – came after she was accused of being the other woman in celebrity chef Marco Pierre White's marriage. The fall-out was so awful it made her realise what life would have been like if it had been true. But fantasy is more important than reality in her story. McCutcheon's readers – like her – will be looking for escape, not great insight into relationships. Even the moral dilemmas have a glossy veneer. Mandy's sister is devastated by her husband's affair just as Mandy is embarking on her own. Mandy is completely torn. But in the end, McCutcheon resorts to "I've-only-met-you-for-two-minutes-in-a-crowded-room-but-this-is-obviously-bigger-than-both-of-us" clichés. For a woman who loves choice, her characters are straws in the wind of destiny.

Does she believe in love at first sight? "I believe in huge connection at first sight that can be recognised later on as love – but what was that thing in the first place? I believe love isn't simple and it's one of the things that makes people break all the rules. I never judge anyone about relationships. I have been in situations with girlfriends where people have said, 'What are you doing?' When in actual fact, they've been right. They stuck to their guns and they got the man they wanted."

It's not that she approves of people deliberately hurting others. "But I always love women – and men – who dare to love and dare to lust passionately, and dare to take risks and go for things that are true to themselves." What happens, she says, when you meet your soulmate but someone got there first?

McCutcheon's own soulmate seemed elusive in her 20s. She was engaged to DJ Gareth Cooke but broke off the relationship in 1996. He went on to sell salacious stories of their sex life to the press. She then began dating her friend Jonathan Barnham, but that relationship ended after it was revealed that he had attended sex parties behind her back. For the last three years, she has been with singer Jack McManus and says being quieter on the work front gives her time to nurture the relationship. But let's be honest. Her men have tended to be unfaithful. "Once," she says. Only once? She laughs indignantly. "Only once!" The press get it wrong, but she does know the pain of infidelity. "I know the confidence knock that comes with it, and it's a hideous thing to go through."

The implication has always been that she's self-destructive when it comes to men. That she wants someone to marry her and love her but consistently picks bad boys who run a million miles from commitment. (Men, we are supposed to assume, not unlike her father…) "Not true at all," she says. "There has been this thing… I think it suited the press… that someone is loveable if they don't quite have it all. As long as I was the victim in love, I was okay. There had to be some kind of flaw."

But she's not a victim. "Everything about me is about being a survivor," she insists. "You know, I wasn't perfect. There were times I made mistakes in my relationships. I wasn't 'unlucky in love' Martine." It was "absolutely heartbreaking", she admits, when her first love sold his story to the press. But he wasn't the only man who betrayed her. Her father did too, selling his story to the tabloids when she became famous. "I think," she says, "I'd had a hope that he'd gone off and had a lovely family and been a lovely, decent man, and then when he sold his story my mum looked at me, at the kitchen table, and said, 'We did kind of know this would happen. Are you disappointed?' I said, 'Yeah, I just think he has done enough. Why does he have to do this as well?'"

McCutcheon admits she was "fearless" in those days. She didn't need him or want him in her life. But have things changed as she has got older? Children of abusive parents, who have absolutely no reason to love them, sometimes still have an instinct to do so. McCutcheon thinks for a moment. "Maybe I would have been a daddy's girl if I'd had him around until I was nine or something and I had known what I was missing. But all I saw of him was bad. I didn't want him in my life because I was frightened of him so, no, there isn't that instinctive thing there. He doesn't deserve that. I have lots of things I love in my life and lots of dreams – but not about him."

She went to a therapist around that time. She was a teenager still, but so much had happened in her life. "It was really good because I sat down and said what I wanted to say without worrying it would be in the press, without worrying I would upset anyone. I went back for another session and then I sort of thought, I feel better now…"

She never felt she needed a father. Her mother was everything to her. "We just thought we were going to go out and conquer the world together. She did everything to make sure I stayed safe. And once that was done and dusted, she did everything to make me go on and be what I wanted to be. I am so grateful to her for that. If I said, 'I can't do that,' she would say, 'Why not? Why can't you do that? You can go and be a star if you want to be.' She was the one who made me dream big."

Her mother was also the one who kept McCutcheon's feet on the ground. "Whenever I've won an award, my mum says, 'Right Martine, you wash, I'll dry.' It tickles me inside that she does that. I always have washing in the sink. I've got a big ballgown on and pink marigolds and my mum has got the teatowel. And I'll think, here we go, now that I've won the award and got the applause… pep talk. You've come a long way and never forget..."

So Cinderella went to the ball. But there's always that really rubbish bit when the clock strikes midnight and everything falls apart again before the proper happy ending. There were plenty of whispers before midnight tolled that McCutcheon was getting too big for her dainty glass slippers. When she left EastEnders she was devastated that Tiffany was killed off, slamming the door against her return, but producers more or less asked who did she think she was. She proved that she didn't need the safety net by having an international number one with Perfect Moment and two successful albums. She was dropped after the third, a selection of Broadway musical numbers, didn't sell.

Sometimes it's as if McCutcheon has tried so hard to make her star shine brightly that she has risked extinguishing it altogether. Take her West End role as Eliza Doolittle in the Trevor Nunn/Cameron Mackintosh production of My Fair Lady. McCutcheon won the Olivier award but the headlines she attracted were more disaster than triumph. She became ill soon after the show opened, and her on-off appearances became a tabloid saga. Cameron Mackintosh implied that there was a psychosomatic element to her illness; that she simply couldn't handle the emotional demands of a long-running show. She wanted to be a triumph every single night. Was he right?

Martine McCutcheon performing in My Fair Lady

McCutcheon's response is interesting. She doesn't get defensive but considers the question. "I definitely think I learned you have to be a certain breed of racehorse to do that kind of show." She wants magic every night and thinks musical film would suit her better. She doesn't want to give a "painting by numbers" performance. "The real West Enders say you have to do that in order to self-preserve, but I would think, everyone is paying the same amount for a ticket. Why should they get a mind-blowing performance but I tone it down for you?" So she couldn't handle the daily grind of it? "I probably don't do boring very well." Bit of a drama queen, maybe? "No," she says firmly. "I learned a long time ago to keep the drama at work. If you didn't, you'd bust. I mean, you'd just explode."

Understandably, she sounds slightly indignant talking about the physical side of her illness. "It wasn't like I had a sore throat and didn't feel very well. In that case you suck a Locket and get on with it. I was majorly unwell. I had a blood clot in my skull, a blood clot behind my knee." It never made the papers because the demands of the insurance policy meant she couldn't speak about it. "Everyone wanted me to get back to business. That's when I thought, you know, I've got to stand up for me here. People spoke out that I really respected and wished hadn't, but you live and learn that nobody's perfect. You worry that you might not be but then neither are they."

Martine McCutcheon and Hugh Grant in Love Actually, 2003

Her career dived. She formed an unlikely friendship with Liza Minnelli (McCutcheon would later be one of Minnelli's bridesmaids at her wedding to David Gest), who talked her out of quitting. The reward was Love Actually. So what happened? "What happened was I went out to Hollywood. They welcomed me with open arms, but I don't think the agency knew what to do with me. Then I landed a TV series. It was going to be huge, the new Friends. They said, 'Sell your flat and move to LA.' They got me a visa and within 48 hours I was sitting in Toronto in this horrible hotel room with a green TV." She laughs. "It reminded me of being a kid, when we had no decent TV, and I thought, oh my God, the whole point was to get away from all that."

Then a new bigwig arrived at the television channel. McCutcheon has fallen foul of new brooms several times in her career. Once at EastEnders, once in her music career… now it was happening again. The series was axed but she was still channel property. "So at my hottest, hottest time, when I was being offered positive roles, I was gagged and bound and not allowed to work." The American TV career didn't happen. The film career couldn't happen.

Martine McCutcheon and Grant in Eastenders

Later, she did a low-budget film, Jump, with Patrick Swayze, who died recently of pancreatic cancer. "I can honestly say, hand on heart, he was the loveliest man I worked with in the business, and I am not just saying that because of what happened. He was probably the most alive man I've ever met. He was so in love with his wife, and although he was a bit older than me he had an innocence about him. He wasn't one of those guys who are all ego and strut about and it's all about them…" Swayze worked so hard he used to ring up cast members at 2am to go through scenes. They stayed in touch for a while but when he became ill she couldn't reach him and simply left messages. Swayze was a warrior. She'd like to be that.

Rain is trickling slowly down the bistro windows. She says she doesn't expect to be the sunshine girl every day, though you wonder if she once did. She has earned more money in her career than even she dreamed of. Now it's about the work. You need luck as well as talent – has her chance gone? "I hope not," she says fervently. "I hope I'm not finished."

So what's the fairy tale ending she would choose; what's the dream she dares to dream now? "Oh my God," she says and draws in breath. Just a variety of work. Being happy. Another film? "Oh I'd love to do another film." She smiles. "Richard Curtis, take note," she says, and the national treasure laughs at her own cheek. r

Martine McCutcheon will discuss her novel, The Mistress, at Lennoxlove Book Festival (0844 357 7611, www.lennoxlovebookfestival.com), Lennoxlove House, Haddington, on 14 November. She is signing copies of her new novel at Borders, 98 Buchanan Street, Glasgow on 21 November at 12.30pm

This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on November 1, 2009

[SpursFan1902]

I love the caption "Martine McCutcheon and Grant in Eastenders" Her real name and his character name....funny.

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'I am what I am':
Martine McCutcheon shows off her curves in new photoshoot as she insists she is proud to be a role model for 'real' women
Sarah Bull
14th April 2011

She's had her fair share of time in the spotlight over her weight in the past. But now Martine McCutcheon has posed for a new photoshoot to show off her curves and insists she is proud to be a role model for 'real' women. The 34-year-old actress, who previously admitted she fluctuates between a size 8 and a 14, said she has learned to accept and love her figure.

She told SHE magazine: 'I think there's always room for improvement, but I've learned a lot since hitting my 30s and accepting what I am and what I'm not. And I've stopped striving for something I can't maintain. I don't want to fly the flag for being unhealthy and overweight, but I don't want to fly the flag for being too thin either. I've never pretended to be a supermodel. I am what I am. I'm attractive, I make the most of myself and I'm real.'

Content: Martine spoke about her love for fiancé Jack McManus, with whom she is planning her wedding

In the accompanying photoshoot, Martine looks stunning as she poses in a slinky satin dress before changing into a pussybow shirt and polka dot skirt for another shot. However, the former EastEnders star admits it was difficult maintaining her figure in the public eye.

She added: 'I think it was a blessing and a curse growing up in the public eye. I’ve had everything said about me that can be said - the good, the bad, the ugly. You start to realise you need to be own best friend and be kind to yourself.'

Fluctuating: Martine has previously revealed her weight fluctuates between a size 14, seen right, and an eight

As well as proudly displaying her curves in the shoot, Martine sports a glowing complexion, which could be down to the fact she is in the process of planning her wedding to fiancé Jack McManus. However, Martine said she isn't too worried about starting a family too quickly, and would like to enjoy married life before having children.

She said: 'I’m not too worried about having children at the moment. I feel like, it’ll happen when it happens, but I’m not yearning to be a mother. I’d be lying if I said I am. My mum had my brother when I was 15 and I was like another mum to him. So I’ve no illusions about the fairytale family, I know the reality of hard work. I'm enjoying being loved up and having my career my way and feeling a lot more content in my own skin. I think there are lots of passions in life that don’t have to revolve around taking care of someone else 24/7.'

Bikini body: Martine insists she has learned to grow proud of her curves, which she showed off on holiday in 2007

And Martine, who previously dated Mick Hucknall and model James Gooding, said she believes her past relationships put her on the path to meeting singer McManus. She said: 'I don’t think it’s a coincidence that knowing myself made me find someone who’s a lot better for me. How can you pick the right person when you don’t even know yourself? But I wouldn’t change the relationships I had. They helped me define what I wanted.'

[faceless]

Martine stars in this new radio comedy pilot 'No Angel' - you can listen to it on iplayer or HERE if you've got access...

[faceless]

Martine McCutcheon declared bankrupt
bbc.co.uk
12th Feb 2013

Actress and singer Martine McCutcheon has been declared bankrupt after filing for insolvency at a London court. McCutcheon, best known for playing Tiffany Mitchell in EastEnders, petitioned in her given name - Martine Kimberley Sherri Ponting. Bankruptcy trustees KPMG said the star's "largest creditor" was Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. The 36-year-old, who lives in Esher, Surrey, will be discharged from bankruptcy on 2 January 2014.

After EastEnders, McCutcheon launched a briefly successful career as a singer, scoring a number one in five countries with the song Perfect Moment in 1999. She later won a Laurence Olivier Award for best actress in a musical for her performance as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady in 2002. In 2003, she appeared alongside Hugh Grant in Love, Actually, playing Grant's tea lady and love interest, Natalie. The actress also published her first novel in 2009, The Mistress, which featured on the bestsellers list. Recent television work has included roles in Midsomer Murders and Spooks.

KPMG's David Standish, who was appointed joint trustee in bankruptcy of McCutcheon by the Secretary of State on 24 January 2013 said: "Ms McCutcheon petitioned for her own bankruptcy at Kingston-Upon-Thames County Court. "We are now responsible for administering her estate and are in the process of establishing the individual's assets and liabilities; the largest creditor being Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs."

McCutcheon's management declined to comment on their client.

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[SpursFan1902]

Maybe she should have hired someone to 'administer her estate' a little earlier. It doesn't say that she had a manager that stole money from her, it just sounds like she didn't pay her taxes. Don't they have people for that?

[Twirley]

Silly girl. I hope she sorts herself out. I always thought she was a pretty decent actress.