Bird of a feather flies nest
After 33 years of marriage (and plenty of hints that all was not well) TV star Linda Robson finally says: It’s over, enough is enough!
SHE’S made no secret of her marriage troubles.
And now Linda Robson has announced she has split from her husband Mark Dunford after 33 years of marriage, having come to the realisation ‘enough is enough’.
The Birds of a Feather actress, 65, who admitted recently she had been ‘celibate’ for the last two years, said she feels ‘fine’ about the break-up and is planning a trip away with former co-star Lesley Joseph.
Ms Robson, who has two grown-up children with Mr Dunford, 63, said: ‘He’s a really good dad and we had some good years, but enough is enough.
‘I’ve got my family and my kids around me. And I’m going on a cruise with Lesley Joseph in November. I’m keeping busy. I feel fine. I’m just going away on trips all the time.’
Asked if she had plans to date again, she said: ‘I’m not interested honestly. I can’t be a***d with all that.’
Ms Robson, a regular panellist on ITV’s Loose Women, first met her husband when they were children and lived near each other in Islington, north London.
But it wasn’t until she split from her former long-term partner Tony Tyler, the father of her eldest daughter Lauren, in the mid-1980s that she reconnected with window cleaning company boss Mr Dunford and they struck up a
‘Don’t really want any of the same things’
romance. ‘I used to babysit for Mark – he was a couple of years younger than me,’ she said back in 2017.
‘I was 16 and he was 13-and-a-half, and he was a bit of a pain in the butt, to be honest. And we lived in the street next to each other.’
Years later she bumped into him in a local park with her daughter, who proceeded to ask him for a lift home.
‘And then he gives us a lift home and then he asked me out on a date. So that was fate that day because I’d known him all my life and I’d never seen him in that way before,’ she said.
The pair married in 1990 and have a son and daughter together – Louis, 31, and Roberta, 27.
While Ms Robson recently denied speculation that the couple had split, she has hinted at tensions in their marriage on Loose Women, including comments about their sex life and how much time they spent together.
She admitted that, since their children had left home, she would sometimes take herself to a hotel for the night rather than stay at home with her husband.
She told Woman magazine: ‘Women do want it [romance], but when you’ve been married over 30 years, that sometimes goes out the window, doesn’t it?
‘What kept us all happy – a really nice family – is that the kids were there. Then when the kids left there was only me and my husband and that’s when it all changes.
‘You find out you don’t really want any of the same things. I’m a very sociable person and I like going out. Mark doesn’t enjoy any of that, he likes to stay at home.
‘He’s not got loads of mates that he goes out drinking with or anything. So I think that’s when things start to change in the relationship.’
The pair have had to battle through a number of issues over the years, including Ms Robson’s dependence on alcohol, which saw her go teetotal four years ago. Speaking on Loose Women last year, she said she became dependent on alcohol after being prescribed a drug to help combat her depression.
‘I went through a really tough time, I was depressed and I turned to alcohol and had cleaning OCD,’ she said. ‘I used to always have a glass of wine or spritzers in the evening, come 10 o’clock at night, but never in the daytime. And then I got put on medication that sent me a bit mad.
‘I got put on a certain drug which was supposed to help the depression but it didn’t it just heightened it. I completely ruined my family’s lives.’