TV presenter’s bubbly enthusiasm and sense of mischief hid private insecurities

Caroline Flack, who has died aged 40, had become among the most familiar and well-liked faces in popular television, notably as the winner in 2014 of Strictly Come Dancing and as the host since 2015 of the reality dating show Love Island.

Viewers and contestants alike warmed to her unaffected enthusiasm, her throaty chuckle and her sense of mischief. These were first aired when presenting shows spun off from Big Brother (2008) – I’m a Celebrity . . .

Get Me Out of Here (2008-10) and, with Olly Murs, The X Factor (2011-13).

She would go on to host Gladiators in 2009 and, in 2015, The X Factor itself.

Yet if on screen she was cast as the fun-loving big sister, by the tabloid press she was, as a single woman in the public eye, seemingly perceived as fair and willing game.

A brief friendship with Prince Harry in 2009 led to a newspaper expose of her previous relationships. Then in 2011 the Daily Mail described her as a ‘‘cougar’’ – an older woman attracted to younger men – when she dated the One Direction singer Harry Styles, whom she had met on The X Factor.

Styles was 17 and she 31. Caroline Flack was reportedly offered £1 million to become the face of a dating site for cougars, even though she was four years too young to join it.

Harassment she experienced at the time from photographers (as well as from fans of One Direction) led her to reveal that she suffered from anxiety as well as worries about her looks. Newspapers often contrasted her height – 5ft 1 in – with that of taller boyfriends.

She had begun her professional life as an aspiring dancer and, after winning Strictly landed the role of Roxie Hart in the West End production of Chicago in 2014.

The enormous success of Love Island appeared to have cemented her professional status, but in December last year she was charged with assaulting her boyfriend, Lewis Burton, a British tennis player. Her trial was due to take place next month. It is understood she took her own life.

Caroline Louise Flack was born at Enfield, north London. She was the younger of twin girls, she and her sister Jody having a brother and sister who were somewhat older.

Their father, Ian, worked as a sales representative for Coca-Cola in Norfolk, and Caroline grew up in villages around Thetford. Her mother, Christine, helped at a kindergarten but the girls found there were few children in the area to play with and had to make much of their own fun.

Fleck suffered from eczema, which left her self-conscious, and was teased at school for being skinny. Performing attracted her, however, and after leaving school at 16 she moved to Cambridge to attend the Bodyworks dance studio.

She had needed pink tights for her audition

‘‘People see the celebrity lifestyle and assume that everything is perfect, but ... everyone is battling something emotional behind closed doors.’’

and, these being hard to find in rural Norfolk, dyed a white pair with Ribena in the washing machine.

In Cambridge, she worked in a restaurant, and later as a waitress at Pizza Express while trying out for West End shows. Her first taste of success came when she landed a TV advertisement and then, in 2000, a bit part in the Ibizaset film about holiday reps, Is

Harry on the Boat?.

By then, sister Jody had begun working for a television production company and suggested that Caroline should look for opportunities as a presenter. A show reel led to a decade of increasingly steady if always precarious work, beginning with an appearance as Bubbles the Monkey in a skit about Michael Jackson on the satirical show Bo’ Selecta.

In her memoir Storm in a C Cup (2015), Flack observed that she learned her craft largely as the host of the international edition of the music chart show CD: UK. While British audiences saw links presented by Cat Deeley, those in ‘‘Norway and Tahiti’’, as she put it, got Flack – an experience, she wrote, that enabled her to make mistakes without it damaging her prospects.

As it was, she proved to be a naturally warm interviewer and host. She went on to front a programme about the European poker tour and a spinoff of the celebrity sports challenge The Games before getting her real break in television.

This came at the age of 27, when she became the co-presenter of the BBC children’s show TMi, gamely dressing up as a badger and being drenched in buckets of slime.

Her engagement to Andrew Brady, a former contestant on The Apprentice, was broken off in 2018.

‘‘People see the celebrity lifestyle and assume that everything is perfect,’’ she once remarked, ‘‘but we’re just like everyone else. Everyone is battling something emotional behind closed doors – that’s life.

‘‘Fame doesn’t make you happy.’’ –