Caroline Flack
TV presenter
THE TV presenter Caroline Flack, who has died at 40, was synonymous with the reality series, Love Island, on ITV2, having hosted all five series since 2015 and helped to make it one of the most-watched programmes of its kind.
In 2018, she was present as it won a Bafta award for best reality and constructed factual show.
She was already a veteran in front of the cameras, having appeared on E4 Music and the CBBC channel, and then cohosting the revival of Gladiators with Ian Wright on Sky One.
In 2009, she became the presenter of the companion show, I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here NOW, alongside Joe Swash and Russell Kane.
She left in 2011 to host another spin-off, The Xtra Factor, along with former X-Factor contestant, Olly Murs.
She and Murs were then promoted to host the main ITV show, replacing Dermot O’Leary, but lasted only a year after negative reaction from critics and viewers.
The following year, Flack said she had learnt to ignore her detractors. “Not everyone is going to like you so you have to filter it,” she said.
Aside from her presenting jobs, she appeared on the celebrity version of The Great British Bake Off.
In 2014, she took part in Strictly Come Dancing in a winning partnership with Pasha Kovalev. But her success took an emotional toll, she said. She felt as though her body was “covered” in “clingfilm” the morning after her triumph, and that she felt “ridiculous” feeling so low.
“I couldn’t get up and just couldn’t pick myself up at all that next year,” she said.
Last March, she took part in an episode of Channel 4’s charity show, The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up To Cancer alongside the journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy, actor Greg Wise and the Leeds boxer Nicola Adams.
It followed her West End stage debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago.
She had previously been in a touring version of Crazy For You.
She made headlines off-stage as well as on. In 2011, she was linked to the One Direction singer Harry Styles, who had been on The X Factor the previous year when he was 17 and she was 31.
In her autobiography, she went into detail about how she met Prince Harry on a night-out in 2009 through a mutual friend, after she had parted from a boyfriend.
She said they “spent the evening chatting and laughing”, but “once the story got out, that was it. We had to stop seeing each other”.
She added: “I was no longer Caroline Flack, TV presenter, I was Caroline Flack, Prince Harry’s bit of rough.”
Flack became engaged to the former Apprentice and Celebrity Big Brother star Andrew Brady in April 2018, but the pair parted a few months later.
Most recently, she had been in a relationship with the former tennis player Lewis Burton. In December, she denied assaulting him in an incident that left them both covered in blood.
The fallout from that saw her step down as host of the winter series of Love Island. Burton said he did not support the prosecution of her and insisted he was not a victim, Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court was told.
He survives, along with her parents and siblings.