Former Weakest Link star Anne Robinson has revealed she struggled with “heavy shame” after she lost custody of her daughter Emma while battling “an appalling drink problem.”
When the TV presenter, 81, divorced her husband Charles Wilson in 1973, he won full custody of Emma, who was two years old at the time.
Talking to Lorraine Kelly on Saga’s Experience Is Everything podcast, she said: “My mother was amazing, but she was also a very bad drinker.
“And if you grow up with someone with a drink problem, the one thing you’re absolutely determined is that you won’t do the same. And of course I did. I developed the most appalling drink problem in my 20s.
Anne continued: “It was so bad that when I was divorcing my husband, he fought and won custody of Emma, which was the most shameful, and remains the most shameful thing, in my life. I really had to pick myself up from that and somehow start again from quite a low rate.”
The TV star gave up drinking a few years later and worked to rebuild a relationship with Emma, who is now a television and radio producer.
Anne said now, her bond with her daughter is “untouchable.”
“I think the shame is quite heavy,” Anne said. “And I realised I had to stop drinking, which I did in the next couple of years.
“Slowly she was mine again, but it was quite a tough start… we had to start again when she was five or six, to really build a relationship which is untouchable now and has been for years and years and years.”
Anne’s life as a grandmother
As for being a grandmother, added that she has a good relationship with her grandsons too, feeling boys are “uncomplicated” compared to girls.
She said: “Girls are tricky, don’t you find? I see my grandsons now, and they seem very uncomplicated at 16 and 17 compared to girls at 16 and 17. Quite sort of naive really, in a way.”
Anne revealed in July that she has moved out of her home in the Cotswolds to an apartment in London just a few streets away from Emma and her family.
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