Coleen Nolan has admitted to 'hiding' her marriage troubles from her Loose Women co-stars for years, opening up about how tough she found 'putting on a front' as she had to put a brave face on to appear on the show.
The regular panellist on the ITV daytime programme was given another opportunity to step up as host on Wednesday, as she was joined by colleagues Janet Street-Porter, Linda Robson and Jane Moore. After teasing the imminent arrival of star guest, Wham icon Andrew Ridgeley, Coleen cracked on with the first discussion topic of the live episode, whether the panel would keep their personal issues to themselves and try and sort them out workout the help of others.
Jane kicked things off by explaining that. as an only child, she became used to just dealing with problems on her own growing up, having not had siblings to confide it and it was at that moment that Jane also addressed the fact that Coleen very privately dealt with the issues in her marriage to now ex husband, Ray Fensome, with her Loose Women pals none the wiser, as she kept things very much 'business as usual' ion public, turning up to work and doing her job as expected.
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Opening up on the reasons for her silence at the time, Coleen said: "I wasn't ready to share it with everyone and I didn't think it was fair on him or Chaira, 'cos we hadn't really talked about it amongst ourselves; we just both knew it was going wrong."
Talking about how tough she found coming to work on Loose Women during the tough time at home, Coleen continued: "It was so hard for me to sit on here...because I hate lying. So whenever topics came up in the meeting, I'd go 'Please don't talk about marriage or how do you know when a marriage is going wrong, because I can't lie and sit there and pretend that it's not going wrong for me." She then added: "So that was hard couple of years for me."
It was in 2018 that Coleen confirmed that she and Ray, father of daughter Ciara, were divorcing, saying: "There is too much dividing me and Ray. We can’t go back. And my future is going to be very different to the one I’d imagined back then."
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