Danniella: I was so broke I tried to get a job at Aldi
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Danniella on Instagram last week
SOAP legend Danniella Westbrook has revealed she was once so broke she begged for a job at Aldi, but was turned down for being too famous.
The actress, 47, who found stardom as Sam Mitchell in EastEnders, struggled to get work after being fired from the show because of her cocaine habit.
She said: “When you’re in a low place, you go home and sob. It makes you not want to be an actor, but by then the whole country knows you and you can’t just go and get a job in Asda.
“Trust me, I’ve tried. When I was on the breadline I tried to get a job at Aldi and people were like, ‘We can’t really give you a job. You’ll be a liability because people will be coming in taking pictures’.
“I said people would get bored and that I had to earn money. But they said they couldn’t give me a job.”
Danniella was 16 when she arrived in Albert Square in 1990 to play Phil and Grant Mitchell’s feisty younger sister.
She left after three years to take on other roles, but was invited back two years later. In 1996, she was sacked after bosses tired of her poor attendance and unreliability. She later admitted blowing £100,000 on cocaine in just two years.
In 1996, the BBC1 soap gave her another chance, but in 2000 she was axed a second time. On the first episode of Girl Talk, a YouTube show, Danniella said the show was right to fire her as the decision saved her life.
She said: “I deserved my sackings. I was a liability to that programme. I was a terrible cocaine addict when I was young and I did abuse the platform I was on. I just couldn’t be trusted. It wasn’t a decision that they really had to sit down and make. It was a necessity, I had to go.
“In my early days I was using all the time. If they had kept me I probably wouldn’t be here today. I 100 per cent think that. Because I’d have just been
FAME With Brian and, top, co-star Mike Reid getting money, turning up and making it OK for me to use.”
Danniella was photographed at the 2000 British Soap Awards with her septum destroyed by her cocaine abuse.
She went into rehab but relapsed in 2014, before getting clean. Danniella recently announced she’d moved to Wales to focus on her mental health after an online spat with Brian Harvey, 46, the East 17 singer she dated in the 90s.
She said: “I’m going through it now on social media, with an ex of mine who is trying to bring me down.
“I went to the police yesterday to make a statement and get a restraining order.”
Danniella, who has a son Kai, 24, and daughter Jody, 18, revealed in 2013 that she had been sexually abused as a child.
She now credits EastEnders with saving her. She said: “Going in to work at the BBC saved my life, because the abuse stopped, which was great.”