Vanessa Feltz has had an epiphany. And all it took was a simple leap of faith: Out of a moving taxi.
Just minutes before, the TV star had been told that her long-time fiance-of-16 years was cheating on her – and having got him to confess during their fraught cab journey, she simply couldn’t bear to be in his presence a second longer.
So, she opened the door. And jumped.
It was not the first time she had been warned about the former boybander’s behaviour. But it was the first time her own daughters, Saskia and Allegra, had been the ones to break the news to her.
And that was her wake-up call.
“I suppose you could say my entire love life has been a complete abomination, a catastrophe, an absolute car crash,” Vanessa says. “People might think I’m an absolute fool. And if they do, they would not be wrong.”
Today, as she opens up about her rollercoaster relationships in our exclusive interview, the star remarkably insists that she still wholeheartedly believes in love – but also reveals she’s now come to an important realisation: She’s done with frogs, users and wrong ‘uns, however charming they might first seem.
After all, the 62-year-old’s certainly had her share – from her cheating ex-fiance Ben Ofoedu to the ex-husband who called her “disgustingly fat” and put her on a “12-week trial period” to the supposedly super-religious ‘nice guy’ who cheated on her and boasted about it to her friend’s brother.
“I’ve been single for 21 months and counting. It’s not my happy state,” Vanessa tells us.
“But I’m certainly not going to be plunging in with any old renegade who comes along and says they like my eyes.
“I won’t be going ‘Here’s my cheque book’, ‘Come and take a kidney, what would you like?’ ‘Please let me give you half my house immediately’. I’m not doing that anymore.
“I’m just not doing that. I’ve got to have learned something from all of this, haven’t I?, and I hope I’ve learned that anyway.”
Frank and honest, Vanessa hasn’t got time for fame seekers either: “My last relationship has put me off dating anyone who’s a wannabe,” she says.
“Some just want to grab your coat tails and let you drag them up a red carpet. And I’ve really just about had enough of being somebody’s access-all-areas lanyard.”
You can’t blame her.
Speaking ahead of the release of her new memoir Vanessa Bares All, the TV star has clearly been reflecting on her past. And she can say with absolute certainty: she’s been badly let down by nearly every man in her life.
It was January 2023 and she had been at a West End restaurant for a family dinner, when her then-fiance, 10 years her junior, decided to call a cab, before she’d even finished eating.
Her adult daughters, fed up at the way he treated her, couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
They’d been tipped off by an online troll that her fiance had been playing away. And as he tried in vain to hurry his fiancee away, it all came tumbling out.
Staggered and shocked, Vanessa got into the waiting taxi, let the news sink in, and then confronted her beau.
“He was spluttering, stuttering, expostulating. I didn’t understand because he wasn’t making sense,” she reveals.
Eventually he admitted he had been messaging another woman – which she later discovered had been going on at least a year. And It wasn’t his first betrayal.
“I couldn’t stand another second. I couldn’t bear it,” she explains. “I opened the door of the moving taxi and jumped. My coat was torn. Blood was seeping from a cut on my arm. I assumed he would stop the cab and follow to see if I’d survived the leap.
“He didn’t.”
Instead he mistakenly sent her a string of texts meant for the other woman – then posted Instagram pictures of him partying at a club. She changed the locks that night and has not seen him since.
Today is the first time she has spoken about what happened. Vanessa, understandably, would prefer never to speak his name again. So she calls him ‘One Hit Wonder’ (OHW), a reference to his 1999 hit. He has been disappointedly vocal about her, however.
“I tried to take the high ground on it and not say anything at all, but it’s made me pretty miserable,” Vanessa tells us. “Especially as I had loved this person. And I think I had been a loving and kind, loyal, sort of decent, faithful, smiling, encouraging kind of partner. I don’t think I’d done anything to deserve that.”
She could say the same about the way her first husband treated her.
She married consultant orthopaedic surgeon Michael Kurer, the father of daughters – child therapist Saskia, now 35, and solicitor Allegra, now 38 – in 1985.
For 16 years Vanessa thought they were blissfully happy. Then one Sunday in September 1999, he blindsided her.
“I was joking about being broody,” she recalls. “Then out of nowhere, he said in a Dalek-like voice: ‘I-do-not-rule-out-the-possibility-of-a-divorce’.”
She asked the only question she could: “why?”. His reply was chilling.
“‘You are just so fat, so fat. It’s hideous’,” Vanessa remembers him saying. “‘You are hideous. I keep waiting for you to get diabetes’.”
The star, who was a normal size 18, went into shock.
“I couldn’t breathe properly. I could hardly see,” she recalls.
A few days later Michael outrageously offered her a 12-week “trial” period to save the marriage.
He never explained the criteria on which she would be ‘judged’. But given his earlier outburst, she decided to get as thin as possible fast as she could. She survived on apples, hard-boiled eggs, and fewer than 300 calories a day while training seven days a week.
“I had to win the trial,” Vanessa explains. “Saskia was 10 and Allegra was 14. This wasn’t a challenge I could fail.”
Six weeks in, she had dropped at least a dress size, if not more.They went to her cousin’s wedding, she wore a stunning black and white dress, they danced and chatted. She thought they might be getting over the blip.
But later that night, he suddenly jumped up out of bed. He grabbed a suitcase, packed it there and then, and left. It turned out he’d been having an affair.
The next day, he returned to inform his bewildered daughters their parents no longer loved each other and he was moving out. His cold, matter-of-fact delivery left the girls distraught – something that Vanessa can never forgive.
“I think that one can forgive on one’s own behalf. But I feel very differently about anyone who does anything to my children,” she says ardently. “Especially the person who is meant to love them the most in the world. So I cannot feel that I can forgive.
“I don’t feel that I can forgive anybody who does anything to cause my children pain and shock and grief and thoroughly destabilise them.”
It was Vanessa’s grandmother who introduced the eligible doctor Michael to Vanessa – having met him when he treated her in hospital. Vanessa was 22 and had just graduated with a degree in English Literature from Cambridge. Raised in a north London Jewish family, she’d been taught marriage was the ultimate achievement. Ten weeks later, she and the doctor were engaged.
Just a few hours after she said yes, her mother Valerie had booked the wedding hors d’oeuvres. Three months after that, Vanessa was expecting Allegra.
“I never felt I had the luxury of waiting,” she explains. “I felt that everything was incredibly urgent and it was particularly urgent to find a partner, to get married and then to have another partner when my husband walked out on me. I would have got married the next morning if I could have found someone!”
It was actually six years later when she met ‘OHW’ by the chocolate fountain at the OK! Magazine Christmas party. She should have seen the red flags there too.
For one, he wanted to be her plus one for showbiz events but then would then stay on partying alone.
Nowadays, she admits she hates spending time at home alone – even after her emergency operation to remove a kidney stone last month.
It’s been 636 days since the split and she has been out every single night, bar one.
Her one evening in – Sunday, January 28, 2024 – involved a salmon fillet in foil, watching television and a bath. It’s An experience she writes off with one withering word: “Bearable”.
“It’s not the house’s fault I haven’t wanted to sit in it,” she writes in her memoir, which is being serialised exclusively in the Mirror this weekend. “But weeks before my sixty-first birthday I was suddenly solo yet again and I couldn’t hack it. The idea of hanging about all by myself till I left for work the next day was too echoingly empty to contemplate. So, I went out instead.”
She’s had a lot of support from her close friends, including the “resilient, absolutely devoted, indefatigable” Myleene Klass (“She’s my stellar standout celebrity pal from heaven”), Loose Women ’s newly-single Linda Robson (“She a great laugh and always out on the tiles”), Rylan Clark (“he’s such a lark”), and the “lovely, lovely” Holly Willoughby (“one of the few people as beautiful on the inside as the outside”).
Vanessa has also started dating – to mixed results.
“First was the extremely orthodox – synagogue seven mornings a week, kosher to the max – chap with an unexpected penchant for nightclubs who thought he was a dead-ringer for Al Pacino,” she reveals.
They enjoyed four months of “wining, dining and writhing about in the boudoir” despite the fact he repeatedly asked her “Am I the handsomest man in the room?” – without ever repaying the compliment.
It ended when he boasted about hooking up with another woman at a wedding – to her friend’s brother. When questioned by Vanessa, he admitted it, but never apologised.
Other dates have included an entrepreneur who tipped off the paparazzi, a property developer who showed her pictures of his dead mother on their first date, an ex from 1974 who she realised was still “a pill”, and an “insufferably pompous legal beagle with a Roller and handsome chauffeur”. She dumped the lawyer and had a date with the chauffeur instead.
It’s a sitcom in the making. But Vanessa, a devoted grandmother of four, is genuinely hopeful The One will come along soon. Claiming she’s “genetically hard-wired to want a mate”, she admits she can’t be truly happy alone.
“I do believe in love,” she says fervently. “I hope that one day, Cupid will tap me on the shoulder, and I will find true love again. I would like to be able to say to a man, ‘I love you’. I really miss that.”
And for all her “rollicking” career success, she would happily trade it in for a happy relationship.
“I would have chosen a lasting and loving marriage over any career because it was the most important thing to me,” she confesses. “And I still think the same thing actually. Career is not the main thing.”
Hopefully Mr Right will be right round the corner soon. Just remember to keep tight hold of those kidneys though, Vanessa.
*Vanessa Bares All: Frank, Funny and Fearless, by Vanessa Feltz (Transworld, £22), is published October 24.
