IL STORIES

a child star at 12 playing Charlie ly Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. n the “dairy milk” line – with a golden ound rural Lowville in New York state, eterinary clinic. veterinary medicine is a really nice mix ad, using your brain and problemsical aspect that I enjoy. involvement with Willy Wonka, I did o with it. Everybody could be so lucky e then go in a different direction.” DANNIELLA Westbrook, once the darling of the Queen Vic in EastEnders, began pulling pints to make ends meet in a real London boozer.

She started putting in shifts behind the bar at The Bill Nicholson pub in Tottenham after struggling to find acting work and was seen lugging around a vacuum cleaner at the pub a stone’s throw from Tottenham Hotspur’s White Hart Lane Stadium.

She wrote on Twitter: “I help my mate at her pub, it makes me feel useful and I laugh all day. The locals are the nicest bunch, always respectful even though I’m a West Ham girl.”

Danniella, cast at 16 as Peggy Mitchell’s daughter Sam in EastEnders, battled a cocaine addiction that eventually ate away the flesh between her nostrils.

Now 43, she is trying her hand as a DJ after coming fifth in last year’s Celebrity Big Brother. LEE MacDonald – Zammo Maguire in school drama Grange Hill – is a locksmith with a shop in Surrey. As Zammo he starred in the 1980s Just Say No anti-drugs campaign.

His dreams of reinventing himself as a professional boxer were ended by a car accident at 21.

Lee said: “I got the part of Zammo at 12 and did it until I was 17.

“After the celebrity, and the excitement of boxing, here I was at 21 working in a wholesaler’s. My early 20s were really dark because of that. It took time to sort myself out. I started learning the locksmith trade then took my own shop.

“I do bits and pieces of acting but the shop is my main port of call.” When one door closes…