TV star and entrepreneur Anthea Turner, 64, talks to Gemma Calvert about why, after more than 30 years in the entertainment industry, she’s still in demand, how she healed a rift with her sister, and her passion for clean eating — even at Christmas.
Words: Gemma Calvert. Images: Alison Webster
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In our family, there’s no normal Christmas. It changes year on year and I suppose that’s the downside of families splitting up. Each Christmas the girls [Claudia 28, Amelia 30, and Lily 32, the daughters of Anthea’s ex-husband Grant Bovey] and I always make sure we get together and we have a great relationship, for which I’m very grateful. The girls also have fabulous mother-in-laws and I’m really pleased for them.
Many years ago, on Russ Lindsay’s 40th birthday, his wife Caron Keating said, “My children are a credit to everybody who’s had a hand in bringing them up.” I always thought that was a great and very generous line from a mother because she had been ill with her cancer and was, at the time, in remission and living in Cornwall. She really meant those words, which have always stayed with me.
Claudia is pregnant so I’m going to have my first grandchild! She’s due in February and, my gosh, we’re all very excited. I don’t know what I’ll be called – Granny Anth, maybe! Claudia’s having a little boy and I couldn’t be prouder. It’s going to be the most wonderful gift for 2025.
I genuinely like healthy food and like to feel healthy, which doesn’t change at Christmas time. I love pasta and gorgeous bread but they are both seen as a treat. I also love milk, but I don’t drink a pint a day. It’s a slightly Gemini approach to food: I like a little bit of everything. I love chocolate, but I wouldn’t sit and eat a whole block of Cadbury’s.
I like 75 per cent dark chocolate. I prioritise good gut health but when I look at some foods I think, “I’m really sorry, gut!” Mark [Anthea’s fiancé, businessman Mark Armstrong] and I spend quite a bit of time in Italy and we’ve been in the south of the country this year enjoying lots of fabulous lemon sorbets and pasta on the Amalfi Coast. I don’t eat heavily processed food and I tend to eat clean. I prioritise protein so I start the day with eggs, Greek yoghurt, nuts and berries.
Christmas lunch is a Sunday roast with a cracker. But in my book, it’s down to a good quality, homemade gravy with olive oil-roasted vegetables and a good Christmas pudding with a splash of cream, as opposed to custard. I’ve eliminated a lot of sugar from my diet. One of the worst things you can have is sugar, which is why I now curtail wine too. If I go out with the girls, I’ll order a glass of white wine and a big bottle of sparkling water with loads of ice to follow it up.
I lift more weights now than I did because I’m mindful of bone health. I belong to a gym, which is a bit of an old sweatshop but I love it! I do weights three times a week if I can, then on Sunday morning I do a 40-minute run. I don’t want to be a weak older person. Staying as strong as you can does you a favour.
I have osteopenia and if you work hard on it with the right food, taking the right supplements – I take vitamin D with vitamin K2 for bone health as well as having more protein and calcium through my diet – and lift weights, you can reverse that, which is the aim because I don’t want it to develop into osteoporosis. I use a BioDensity machine for 10 minutes a week, which promotes increased bone density and muscle strength and reduces blood glucose levels with exercise-based therapy.
We are bombarded constantly with fear when it comes to beauty products and skincare. Most people have healthy skin and there isn’t a problem with it but we attack it by smoking too much, drinking too much, and spending too long in the sunshine without protecting it. Then we scrub it too much, stick acids on it, don’t feed it the right nutrients through the food we eat. Everything you eat reflects on your skin, hair, nails and eyes so when it comes to skincare, I believe that less is more, which is why I created my Balm 6, which has six uses: it’s a make-up remover and cleanser, a face mask, a lip balm, a balm for eyebrows, lashes and cuticles, and it nourishes dry hair.
Since developing the product, I no longer spend lots of time on lengthy daily skincare regimes. Instead, I adapt Balm 6 according to how my skin feels each day, using more if it’s dry, less if not – it’s that simple. The best bit of feedback I’ve had about Balm 6 and Body 3, my latest product, is that they help skin look better because they offer protection and nourishment, rather than being aggressors. You have a sebum barrier on your skin, which you probably spend a lot of time stripping with various products. I prefer to eat my vitamin C rather than putting it on my skin, for example. I’ve learned over the years, after spending a small fortune on creams, lotions and potions, that the main aim is to lock in the moisture, not strip it off, and that’s everything that Balm 6 does.
When you’re in your 40s, you can’t imagine having sunspots and wrinkles, but they come, so trust me, put on a bit of factor 30! I’m not somebody who sits there covered up. I love sunshine and vitamin D but if you want to have decent skin in your late 50s and into your 60s and beyond, you mustn’t overdo the sun, and if you smoke, cut it out. I have thin, peaches-and-cream European skin. I do use Botox, I have a tiny bit of filler in my cheeks, and I’ve also used lasers.
I started having Lynton laser treatment to remove unwanted hair because the thought of having a bikini wax was absolutely horrific. I’ve since used laser treatment and IPL [intense pulsed light therapy] to sort thread veins and pigmentation marks, which white skin is very susceptible to. I’ve definitely had one too many sunny holidays, running around on the beach when I could have been in the shade. I’ve since mended my ways and I’m now the one wearing a big hat under an umbrella!
My friends and I often say: “How old do we think we are?” I always think I’m somewhere between my late 40s and early 50s. I know my body and face might not reflect that, but that’s where I feel I am. Every so often I get a little wake-up call that reminds me that I’m not, whether that’s talking about my senior bus pass or, for example, when I was recently doing something to do with finances and they would only do a 10-year plan because they think I’m not going to be working and I’m washed up!
I’m a Gemini. You can put me anywhere, and I’ll adapt. I’ve lived in the countryside and thoroughly enjoyed it, then I came back to London. I read some research recently that said people feel most happiness at home because of family, community and accessibility, so the best places to live are where you can walk to all your amenities. In London, I can walk to a high street, a cinema, theatres and lovely restaurants.
Would I exchange that for acreage? Now my stepchildren are all grown up and doing their own thing, the answer is no. My fiancé Mark and I make use of London. He’s lived in London since he was five and I’ve started to see how useful it is to be able to walk out of my front door and straight to places. I’ve come away from the roses round the door idea, as lovely as it sounds, in favour of a city lifestyle. The energy I get from living and socialising in a city and from being around lots of people can never be underestimated.
I get up in the morning with a list of things to do and I can’t imagine not working in some shape or form. I see amazing women such as Angela Rippon, Gloria Hunniford and Esther Rantzen, who is still campaigning despite her own health issues, and think that television has changed and it’s not as ageist as it once was. It’s very easy to say, “They don’t want me anymore because I’m too old,” but for me, I’ve found that there’s quite a lot of work, especially commercially, for what I refer to as the “scrubbed-up over-50s”!
Losing my mum [in May 2022] was terribly sad and a big change. Mum wasn’t well for some time. She’d had a minor stroke, wasn’t as good on her pins, and Dad was looking after her. When you see a parent become ill, especially Mum, who was the family’s grand organiser, you see that person slowly start to die, to fade away. Then it becomes your normality.
When you know someone’s life is ending, it’s important to talk about it because the more we talk about it and prepare for it – although it’s still terrible and really sad when the person dies – it’s not a complete curveball shock. These sadnesses are going on all the time so if you have big-picture thinking, it helps you generally in life.
We all have bad days, myself included. I’m probably of a generation that hid our feelings more than people do now and maybe we expose too much now. I’ve seen some people on Instagram sharing a lot of their mental health, but I worry that it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You repeatedly share your feelings and down times, then you think: who am I if I haven’t got my trauma? Then your trauma can start to define you, your divorce can start to define you, your weight can start to define you. It’s quite frightening that trauma can be normalised.
When I’ve got a problem, I turn to Mark. He’s good for me because if I’m being a bit of a drama queen, he’s very calm. Equally, we can both have drama about different things, so we cancel each other out. If I’m worried about something, I speak to my manager and friend, Vickie. Other times I’ll speak to my dad or my sister. I had therapy after my divorce, when I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. I was learning to live alone and to be alone. When you’ve been married for a long time and part of a family structure, it takes time to come to terms with that changing. Whatever your structure was, it’s now different.
My sister Wendy and I didn’t speak for two years but I don’t look back with any regret over time wasted. It was a blip on the graph of our family life and probably some good did come out of it. Maybe at that time we needed to go on our separate journeys but we’re family so we’d have always fixed it at some point. When Mum became ill, it was a big reason to sort things out.
Now, things are good and we’re working on two projects: our children’s book Underneath The Underground, and we’ve launched a little production company so we’re working on some TV projects. We’ve done the “least said, best mended” approach, which means we haven’t sat down and gone, “Well, if you hadn’t done this, I’d have done that,” and I don’t think in every circumstance in life that’s the way to fix it. Sometimes picking up where you left off is best.
All of our reference points are very similar because we were brought up in the same household and our focus has very much been looking after Dad who has lost his partner of 67 years. He’s lived in the same Midlands village all of his life but he’s recently moved south and is now 15 minutes away from Wendy and half an hour from me. That’s made life a lot easier and nicer for Dad. We’ve noticed a massive difference in him now that he’s near us, plus going out and doing things. The other weekend, we all went on a family bike ride and, at 91, he was cycling along the River Thames with us!
Sometimes life gives you a bashing through problems with health, divorce or when something happens to somebody close to you, but getting through things is down to having the right attitude. Everybody talks about the midlife crisis but after the age of 10, I experienced a crisis at every decade. Between the ages of 10 and 20, my sister died, then in the 80s I had boyfriend crises, in the 90s I went through my first divorce, then another one 17-or-so years later.
But life is life and it’s about how you tackle problems. As a woman you’ve got to be canny, pick your battles and look after your health. If you want to sit there eating Pringles and watching daytime television, that’s up to you but we only get one go at life. We’ve got to make the best of what we’ve got, cherish what we have and put ourselves back together after having the stuffing knocked out of us. I try my best to make a conscious effort to think positively. I can sound a bit Pollyanna-ish sometimes, but I always think: let’s look at the good in this.
BALM 6 (£39.99) and BODY 3 (£32.99) are available from antheaturner.com.
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