EastEnders legend Natalie Cassidy recently announced she was leaving the BBC soap after 30 years, but what is the star’s life like off-screen?
Natalie Cassidy is perhaps best known for playing the role of Sonia Fowler in the BBC soap EastEnders, having made her first appearance in the London-based programme when she was just 10 years old. The actress has appeared on the soap on and off for the past 32 years, but she confirmed she’d quit earlier this week much to the disappointment of her fans.
Sonia’s final scenes will be filmed in February, but viewers will have to wait and see whether the well-loved character gets killed off in classic soap style or exits in another memorable way. In a heartfelt statement announcing her decision to leave Walford behind her, Natalie said she was “extremely sad” but also “very excited” to be moving on.
While she only confirmed in her message that she was heading to “pastures new,” the mum-of-two has a pretty hectic life off-screen. When she’s not working on EastEnders, she’s recording her podcast series, Life With Nat, where she chats away to family, friends, and the occasional celebrity guest about their lives.
As her Instagram bio states, Natalie describes herself as a “mum, fiancée, auntie, actress, podcaster, and joker.” The star also collaborates with brands and companies as an ambassador.
Away from her non-acting work commitments, Natalie lives with her fiancée, cameraman Marc Humphreys, and two children, Eliza and Joanie. She previously described Marc as her “soulmate,” and the pair met in 2014 when he worked on several episodes of EastEnders.
They got engaged in 2015, just a few months before announcing they were expecting a child together, who they named Joanie.
Natalie’s eldest child, Eliza, has a different father to Joanie. Her dad is Adam Cottrell, who was in an on-and-off relationship with Natalie for several years from 2009 before splitting for good in 2013 “after a lot of misery”.
Marc restored Natalie’s faith in romance – but the couple are yet to tie the knot. Speaking on the Memory Lane podcast, the actress opened up about wedding plans. She stated: “Do you know what? It’s a lot of money. No, I tell you what it is; it’s time and budget. It is because I go, ‘I’ll only do something small; I don’t need to…’
“I will do it small, but I want to be at The Ledbury. Oh, I want a Michelin star meal or I’m just a bit of a snob genuinely. I’ll want the best flowers, and I will want a designer suit.”
In September, Natalie opened up about her personal life with OK! Magazine. She revealed that “everything is very hectic” and addressed dealing with “mum guilt”.
“I get mum guilt all the time, 100 per cent,” she admitted. “And I think that’s why we need to talk about it more. I don’t think you understand until you have children. People saying, ‘Don’t have children if you want a career’ is ridiculous. It’s an ignorant thing to say.
“We’re not living in the 1950s, Dad doesn’t go to work while Mum stays at home. But we don’t have the infrastructure to support families who need to work. The childcare right now just doesn’t work. So all of that needs to be looked at and changed.”
The 41 year old does have a nanny to help with her childcare responsibilities. She explained: “Obviously, you pay a price for having [a nanny], but we wouldn’t be able to do everything without secure and solid childcare. We share our responsibilities on the days that we can, and it’s quite equally divided between us.”
Family has always been important to Natalie, and she took care of her father, Charles, during his final days in 2021 after he moved into her home when his health declined. “I bought my current house for him really because it has an annexe,” she explained.
Recalling that time, Natalie said: “I was only a carer for him at the very end of his life. I look back, and I don’t actually know how I did it, but I had help from my mother-in-law. The juggling of different generational care is a whole other ball game, really.”
Natalie’s relationship with her late father strengthened following the tragic loss of her mother, Evelyn, who died from bowel cancer in 2002 when Natalie was 19 years old.
“That was an age where you don’t want to be at home and you don’t want to be with your parents,” she told OK! “I felt robbed of having the time where you come back in your 20s and you want to be with your mum.”
The star added: “I’ve always felt very guilty that she left the world thinking that I didn’t care. I know she knew that I did, because she’d been a young girl herself and understood, but that was a hard thing to deal with. And that I still deal with to this day.”