Singer hit it big with Girls Aloud
Celebrity life gave way to personal woes
Sarah Harding, who has died of cancer aged 39, shot to fame in 2002 when she auditioned to be part of a girl band as part of Simon Cowell’s ITV reality talent show Pop Stars: The Rivals, and won a place in Girls Aloud alongside Cheryl Tweedy, Nadine Coyle, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh.
Unlike other pop groups hot-housed on reality TV shows, Girls Aloud proved to be much more than a one-hit wonder. Their first single, Sound of the Underground, went straight to No 1, and the group went on to release five albums, two of which topped the rankings, and a further 20 Top 10 singles including I’ll Stand By You, Walk This Way (with Sugababes) and The Promise. They also won a total of five Brit Award nominations.
They toured until 2009, took a break for three years, reunited in 2012, toured again and released another single, Something New, for Children in Need, before splitting up in 2013.
While pursuing her pop career, Harding, a striking-looking blond, landed a modelling deal with the lingerie makers Ultimo. She also worked on other campaigns, including Cocacola Zero and got parts in two St Trinians films, in the low-budget thriller Bad Day (2008) and the BBC television film Freefall (2009).
But the celebrity lifestyle took its toll. Relationships with a series of boyfriends never seemed to last. An engagement to the DJ Tom Crane in 2011 was soon broken off; in 2012 she was reported to have had a six-week affair with the Eastenders actor Danny Dyer when they met on the set of Run For Your Wife, a relationship that allegedly ended when Harding learned that he already had a long-term partner.
She was regularly snapped by paparazzi coming out of trendy London nightspots looking the worse for wear. In 2011 she spent time in a rehab facility, reportedly for alcohol abuse, depression and sleeping pill addiction.
In an interview in 2015 Harding said she had settled down and liked nothing better than pottering around her home in Berkshire: “I have five animals and lead the country life now. I’ve got a veggie patch and everything.”
However, though “more content” than she had been during her Girls Aloud days, she confessed to feeling “out of the loop on a lot of things.”
But her attempts to rejoin the loop did not go according to plan. A solo singing career foundered when her 2015 single Threads failed to make the charts. The same year she took a guest role on Coronation Street as Joni Preston, the glamorous wife of chef Robert (Tristan Gemmill).
In 2016 she was forced to pull out of the Channel 4 ski contest The Jump with a torn ligament and also dropped out of a stage adaptation of Ghost: The Musical. Critics claimed she was slurring and stumbling on stage; she blamed painkillers.
In 2017 she agreed to be a housemate on Celebrity Big Brother, but her stint on the show seemed to show her crumbling under the pressure even as she took the crown.
After getting drunk in Week Two, she was seen starting a romance with Chad Johnson which ended
SHE STEPPED AWAY FROM THE SPOTLIGHT, GIVING UP ON SOCIAL MEDIA.
not long after they left the CBB house, but which also brought an end to her relationship with the boyfriend she had had when she first entered the show.
Afterwards she stepped away from the spotlight, giving up on social media and shying away from public life.
In August 2020, after a sighting in hospital sparked online speculation, Harding revealed in a lengthy post on Instagram that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer earlier in the year and that the cancer had spread.
She was born Sarah Nicole Hardman on Nov. 17, 1981 at Ascot, Berkshire. Her father, John, a musician, had been in a band called Sunfighter in the 1970s.
When she was 14 the family moved to Stockport, but her parents’ marriage broke up.
She attended Hazel Grove School, but was often in trouble and left aged 15. “If it didn’t involve a textbook, I was happy,” she once said.
In her Instagram post, she expressed her thanks to her “amazing mother, family and close friends,” for supporting her, as well as the “wonderful” doctors and nurses at the hospital where she was being given chemotherapy.