Margi Clarke: How Paul Gascoigne helped me finally kick the booze

AT the height of her fame in 1995, Margi Clarke semed to have it all.

She had a stable relationship and young daughter, a smart home in her native Liverpool, a BMW, designer clothes and a regular role in Coronation Street as Jackie Dobbs, who blew in and out of her son Tyrone’s life like a whirlwind.

But, within a short space of time she managed to self-destruct so badly that it looked like there was no way out of the pit into which her life had fallen.

After the death of her beloved mother Frances from lung cancer in 1996, she began to drink from grief and before she knew it was consuming a couple of bottles of wine or more each day.

The booze used to make her feel invincible, she says, but bosses at Granada TV weren’t impressed when she turned up for work hungover or smelling of drink, and her contract was not renewed.

She walked out on her 17-year-relationship, and while determined to keep her excesses from her tiny daughter Rowan, her health was rapidly deteriorating.

“I was very close to my mum, even though there were ten of us, and I was very like her too,” says Margi.

“She knew me through and through and would always say what she thought – especially if she felt I wasn’t behaving well. Losing her left this massive black hole in our lives. I was used to her watching over me.”

Perhaps some tendency to recklessness in Margi was kept in check by her mum, but it certainly took hold after the bereavement, says the actress, who found that work dried up and by 2002 she was on the dole.

“I thought I’d completely blown it, throwing away a fantastic chance with Coronation Street, and for me showbusiness was probably over.”

At one point her family descended on her en masse to persuade her to go into rehab. Her life was in a terrible mess but she resisted.

She had no cash to pay for treatment and didn’t want to leave her little girl. Instead Margi decided to take an even more difficult route, asking a friend to come and stay while she went ‘cold turkey’ at home.

The process of kicking alcohol completely took around a year.

Along the way Margi had discovered that her alcohol abuse had helped to trigger the yeast infection candida albicans.

She had been living on bags of sweets and other sugary foods, which the infection had made her crave.

The result was sickness and lethargy as well as painful blisters on her skin and inside her mouth. It gave her irritable bowel syndrome and rampant athlete’s foot, too.

Conventional medicine didn’t work but a chance meeting with a young woman in a café who was studying naturopathy, an alternative medicine focusing on herbs and nutrition, made the actress research the subject in depth. She felt that here was not only a possible answer to some of her health problems but also a potential career move.

However a part-time naturopathy course would cost £3,000 – money she didn’t have.

Help came from an unexpected quarter, when the former England footballer Paul Gascoigne – no stranger to drink problems himself - sent Margi a cheque for £3,000 so she could start the course.

“I’d met and got on really well with Paul at the premiere of a film I was in called School for Seduction a few years earlier.

“We kept in touch and I’d told him about how I was giving up the drink and hoping to save for this course. Out of the blue he sent me the money. I vowed that if I could ever do anything to help him I would and I will. He gave me a lifeline.”

Margi says having naturopathy as a goal as well as cleaning up her act for her daughter’s sake not only lent her focus during the painful withdrawal from alcohol but speeded up the recovery from her other health problems.

Once on the road to recovery from booze, she says her new detoxifying regime kick-started a return to her old sparking self. The course also taught her skills such as massage and aromatherapy.

Margi and a homeopath friend developed a range of cosmetics called Soul Rinse, made from natural ingredients and not tested on animals, which she began selling on a market in Liverpool and still sells online.

Having thought her acting life was probably over, Coronation Street eventually gave her another chance and have continued to use Margi to visit chaos on poor Tyrone from time to time.

She may not have returned to big screen roles – having started out as a punk singer, she turned to stage and TV acting before her 1985 breakthrough Letter to Brezhnev, followed up by a few other films including Blonde Fist – but Margi Clarke has always bounced back from setbacks, it seems.

TV presenting roles have included The Tube and The Good Sex Guide (winning her new cult status), and in recent years she has popped up all over the place, with roles in Making Out, Benidorm, Waterloo Road and Casualty.

She has also added a loud dose of scouse humour to Loose Women, Celebrity Masterchef and several panto seasons as a very wicked queen.

She is currently packing them in for a tour of Hormonal Housewives, in which she and her glamorous side-kicks of a certain age (Margi’s now 57) get up-close and personal about chocolate, men, the effects of gravity, PMS, menopause, stretch marks and yet more chocolate.

“To be honest, I really know what I’m talking about and really know who I am now. The groups of women who are coming to the shows seem to love how we tell it like it is,” says Margi.

“I’ve worked in the engine room and drunk claret at the captain’s table; I’ve been up at the top and nearly at the bottom of the Mersey. To be honest I’m made up that I’m still here.”

Life is much calmer now, and that’s just how Margi Clarke likes it.

“I guess it’s good that you learn something about yourself through adversity,” she says.

“I’m thankful most of all that my family and friends stuck with me through the really dark times.”