Denise Welch - Personal Life

Personal Life

Welch's first marriage was to actor David Easter, from 1985 until their divorce in 1988; Welch has since gone public with her belief that he committed adultery. Welch met Tim Healy while they were working together for Newcastle's Live Theatre Company. They married in Haringey, London, in 1988 and have two children, Matthew Timothy (born 1989, Hendon, London) and Louis Vincent (born 2001, Salford, Greater Manchester). Welch announced,live on Loose Women on 6 February 2012, that she and Healy were separated and that they had been for a long time. Welch announced that she was dating Lincoln Townley shortly after this announcement. On 18 August 2012 it was revealed that Townley and Denise were engaged.

Sporadically throughout her adult life, Welch has suffered from Depression which was exacerbated by the birth of her first child. She tried to commit suicide by attempting to jump out of the window of her flat, and subsequently fell into alcoholism and drug abuse. Welch confessed that she found it difficult to cope with the pressures that came with being in Coronation Street, once commenting "I don't know how I did that job. I was desperately ill for most of my time in the Street. It got so bad that I started drinking heavily. I thought it would be a quick-fix way of taking away the pain, but it exacerbated the depression. I could easily down a bottle of wine a day. Other days I would binge-drink until I blacked out. I was still taking anti-depressants and the alcohol would cancel these out—so when I did get an attack of depression it was much worse ... There were mornings when I can't tell you how hard it was to get up for work, and then, when I was on the set, I felt I couldn't say a line properly. I would watch an episode I'd been in and would hardly remember doing it. But the public never realised." Welch also admitted using cocaine while filming Coronation Street and hitting her husband's head with a lamp shade after a "drink-fuelled row".

Welch confessed that her marriage was nearly ruined because of her mental illness, as well as an affair she had during her depression. With the help of her former Coronation Street co-star Kevin 'Curly Watts' Kennedy (a recovering alcoholic), she attended Alcoholics Anonymous and suggests this helped her end her dependency on alcohol. She claimed, "it was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life, but it is also the thing I'm proudest of. And my mental health is now so much better than it was when I was drinking ... I will always have depression—but I'm in control of it now because I've given up drinking". On 29 April 2010 her 320-page autobiography Pulling Myself Together was published, in which she describes how she overcame her problems with alcohol, drugs and depression. It became a best-seller in the UK.