Casualty and Holby City star Amanda Mealing has admitted to driving after taking cocaine and has been banned from driving for 22 months while also needing to pay £485 in fines
Amanda Mealing, star of BBC medical dramas Casualty and Holby City, pleaded guilty earlier this week to drug driving. It comes after the actress crashed her Mini into a Skoda, leaving the nurse behind the wheel seriously injured.
The victim, Mark Le Sage, 58, has had to give up his career as a theatre nurse due to his injuries. He has since claimed he believes things could have been far worse had he not been driving such a powerful car. A court heard Mealing, 57, was dealing with the traumatic deaths of her father, her best friend and her dog when she took the Class A drug the night before the smash. The actress has been banned from driving for 22 months and ordered to pay £485 in fines.
Career
Mealing is best known for her portrayal of thoracic consultant Connie Beauchamp in the popular hospital dramas, Casualty and Holby City. She also appeared in the 1994 hit flick Four Weddings and a Funeral. Mealing first appeared on Casualty in 1996, with her Holby City debut coming in 1999.
Other roles on her resume include a part in Grange Hill, while she also starred in Still in 2014 and had roles in The Darling Buds of May and Death In Paradise. However, her first professional performance came when she was six in a Julie Andrews special on BBC television.
In 2002, she had a two-year career break after being diagnosed with breast cancer. She made a full recovery and returned to work. While dealing with her own struggles, she discovered that a close friend had breast cancer, and then just a few months later, there was shocking news that her sister-in-law had also been diagnosed. Their subsequent deaths had a profound effect on Amanda’s mental wellbeing. “There’s always survivor’s guilt. They both had lumpectomies. Their tumours were smaller than mine,” Amanda told the Mirror in 2023. “Of the three of us, I’m the one that shouldn’t be here.”
She has also been a director on productions including Waterloo Road and Coronation Street.
Family life
She has been married to screenwriter Richard Sainsbury since 2 July 1998. They have two children, Otis and Milo. The clan relocated from Bristol to South Wales when Mealing landed a role on Casualty. Otis and Milo’s godfathers are comedian and TV Paul O’Grady and actor Charlie Condou.
Magistrates allegedly heard how Mealing had turned to cocaine while going through divorce proceedings on top of the trio of tragedies in her life, according to the Mail. She is also said to be battling blood cancer, according to her solicitor.
Mealing first said she realised “life can be short… there’s no point sitting around” aged 15 when her brother Stephen died of a heroin overdose. Speaking in 2011, she told The Times: “He was 14 years older than me, but we were incredibly close.
“I think he had dabbled in drugs as a teenager. But it was just an accident. It was a real tragedy for everyone and, yes, it did influence me.
“It reminded me that life can be short and I thought there’s no point sitting around. Go out and live each day.”
Amanda also suffered a devastating loss when her children’s godfather Paul O’Grady died in 2023. She said later that year: “The gatekeeper of my secrets. There was nothing Paul didn’t know – the deepest, darkest secrets about me, and he wouldn’t tell anyone else. I knew I wouldn’t get any kind of judgement from him. I knew that if I said, ‘Oh, this happened or that happened,’ he’d just say, ‘Well, kid, you’re lucky, because when I did…’ and he’d come up with something worse to make me feel better.
“I still go to call him. Something funny or infuriating will happen, and I reach for my phone. “Thanks to Paul, what I do have now is a beautiful dog in his memory. At the funeral, which was only at a small village churchyard, he had a doggy guard of honour. I saw the last dog in the line of five and thought, ‘Oh, I need to have him.’ Then Ronnie Wood walked past and said, ‘She’s gotta have him, give the dog to her.’”
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