Amanda Abbington‘s parents were used to watching their daughter getting rejected, firstly as a young ballet dancer, and then as an aspiring actress, dragging herself through the soul-destroying audition process, seeking her big break.
She would, they say, speaking exclusively to the Mail, simply ‘tough it out’. Their daughter – an only child – is ‘no snowflake’ they insist.
In fact, Amanda’s mother, Patsy, recalls how Amanda’s feet would regularly bleed into her ballet shoes during her twice-weekly training sessions, from age three to 16.
Plus her stage school background – she studied at Laine Theatre Arts in Surrey after school – meant she’d had to develop a thick skin against the ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you…’ brush offs.
‘It’s a tough profession,’ she says. ‘You get rejected a lot. She got rejected a lot in the beginning.’
Amanda Abbington’s parents Patsy, 75, and John, 77, spoke to the Mail from their home in Hatfield, Hertfordshire
Amanda and Giovanni Pernice on last year’s Strictly Come Dancing
As her father John, a retired taxi driver, puts it: ‘She’s been told she wasn’t good enough by far better people than those on Strictly.’
Yet those following the ongoing, protracted saga of Amanda’s complaints about how she was allegedly treated by her dance partner Giovanni Pernice during last year’s Strictly, will know how much their depiction of a tough, resilient little cookie is at odds with this week’s raft of tearful TV interviews where she described how she was ‘bullied’ by her Italian sidekick.
In the nine months since quitting the show after just five weeks, Amanda, now 52, has drip fed accusations about how badly, she claims, Giovanni behaved towards her.
She’d previously described how he’d apparently stamped on her foot during ‘militant’ training sessions, leaving her with a bruised toe.
On Wednesday she went a step further when she told Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy that she had suffered ‘humiliating behaviour of a sexual nature’.
Giovanni, meanwhile, vehemently denies all the allegations and says he is looking forward to clearing his name.
After instructing London-based law firm Carter-Ruck earlier this year, Amanda made a formal complaint to the BBC in April – the result of which is expected to be revealed in the coming days.
Whatever happened to Amanda on the show, no one can deny that it affected her deeply, and has also taken a heavy toll on John, 77, and Patsy, 75.
Self-deprecating and gentle, they are speaking from their home in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, near where Amanda grew up. It’s a haven, with beautiful views of the countryside and friendly neighbours. The first thing you see when you walk in is a framed line drawing of Amanda. There’s another selection of pictures of her in a frame on the mantelpiece.
It’s clear they’ve been living with ‘this Strictly business’ day in, day out, since she sensationally withdrew from the show in October.
‘As soon as I wake up in the mornings and when I go to bed at night I am worrying about it,’ admits John. ‘It’s the after effects I worry about too. Will she be able to carry on with her career?’
Amanda had a very painful split from her partner, the actor Martin Freeman, which, she has widely admitted, left her feeling suicidal and worthless
Amanda gave an interview to Channel 4 as she bursts into tears revealing the ‘brutal’ online abuse she has received
Patsy adds: ‘She has apologised to us because of what we’re going through. It’s been hard.’
The couple say they have seen their daughter go from being a ‘lively, bubbly person’ to the complete opposite since she signed up for the show last summer. To start with, they say, they were excited.
‘It was something that should have been so lovely,’ says Patsy.
John continues: ‘We were all looking forward to it. After the first show, she came back and said it was the hardest thing she’d ever done.’ Things only got worse from there.
‘I knew something was wrong with her because I could see the change in her,’ explains Patsy. ‘She had completely changed.’
At first, Amanda was reluctant to go into details, in a bid to protect them.
After some prompting, however, she admitted that she was crying every morning before going to the Strictly rehearsal studios.
‘She did not want to go in because she hated it so much. Jonathan [her partner] had to coax her to get into the car,’ says John.
‘She missed a week because she was not well, and went back for one week and realised then that she could not take what was happening to her.
‘Then [her doctor] diagnosed her with post traumatic stress disorder.’
It was after quitting the show, and making a formal complaint about her treatment, that the pressure started to show.
‘Certainly, by January and February [this year] she was not the same girl,’ adds John.
‘She is normally such a lively, bubbly person and she completely went the other way.
‘Filming [for Strictly] was between September and November. I think the change in her came then because of the pressure and the realisation of what she’d done. What had she done? She had left Strictly because she felt she was being treated badly.’
So, what was it that drove Amanda, this grounded, hard-working girl from humble beginnings, to prompt a scandal so big that the BBC director general, Tim Davie, issued an apology to anyone who didn’t enjoy their Strictly experience, while throwing the entire future of the Corporation’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’ show into question after 20 glorious years?
The answer, it appears, is somewhat deep rooted.
No stranger to trauma and tragedy, she has weathered many knocks over the years – including a very painful split from her partner, the actor Martin Freeman, which, she has widely admitted, left her feeling suicidal and worthless. Those who know Amanda suggest it left her very bitter and ‘deeply troubled’.
That determined little girl, who’d limped through her ballet classes, hadn’t had an easy time at school, either.
In 2018 she confessed that for three years at primary school her lunches were stolen and she was called ‘ugly, stupid and smelly’. Nobody would play with her.
Amanda, now 52, has drip fed accusations about how badly, she claims, Giovanni behaved towards her on the show
Giovanni, meanwhile, vehemently denies all the allegations and says he is looking forward to clearing his name
‘There was a group of girls who made my life miserable,’ she said. ‘I am now very, very aware of it when it happens anywhere.
‘If it happens to my kids or on the street or on the internet I’ll wade in.’
After drama school, Amanda joined the long queue of jobbing actors looking for a break and secured numerous small parts in TV shows such as The Bill and Casualty, plus various stage productions.
She fell head over heels for Martin, 52, when they starred together on Channel 4’s drama, Men Only, in 2000.
Speaking of the moment she first laid eyes on the actor, who later went on to find fame as Tim in The Office, Amanda said: ‘I was having my make-up done and Martin walked in. Everything else just melted away.
‘When he left I said, ‘Who is that? Please tell me he hasn’t got a girlfriend!’
They never married but they had a son, Joe, now 18, and daughter Grace, 16, and lived in a £900,000 cottage in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, close to where she grew up.
In March 2013, Amanda was declared bankrupt over an unpaid £120,000 tax bill at the High Court under her birth name Amanda Jane Smith.
This was despite Martin being worth £10million after landing the role of Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit film trilogy.
In 2015, she appeared alongside Freeman in the third series of the BBC’s Sherlock.
It was Martin who revealed their split in 2016, and Amanda insisted, at the time, that it was very amicable, and purely down to his work commitments.
He’d spent considerable time abroad filming The Hobbit franchise and also later the US television series Fargo.
More recently, however, she has told of how she sobbed every day for a week and felt suicidal after Martin moved out.
‘At the time, splitting up from him was the most painful thing I’d ever experienced,’ she said in an interview last year.
‘We still get on really well, we still really both admire each other as actors… he’s a great guy, but we just couldn’t live with each other any more.’
In March 2013, Amanda was declared bankrupt over an unpaid £120,000 tax bill at the High Court under her birth name Amanda Jane Smith
She went further in a podcast last year, where she revealed how their split had left her a ‘mess’ who hated herself. Suicide, she said, had been a ‘genuine option for me’ during the dark period of her life.
Nine months after her split from Freeman she began dating The Queen’s Gambit actor Jonjo O’Neill in November 2016.
The Irishman moved into her Hertfordshire home as the pandemic took hold in 2020, but in January 2021, she announced their split on Instagram, saying: ‘Sadly, no Irishman any more. He’s gone… it’s fine, it’s just one of those things.’
She hinted at her heartbreak, however, adding: ‘At the moment I’m quite fragile.’
Freeman, meanwhile, is in a relationship with French actress Rachel Benaissa, who, at 32, is 20 years his junior.
Later in 2021, Amanda told a newspaper how she’d been prescribed antidepressants in 2019 when her GP misdiagnosed her menopause for depression, but had ditched the pills in favour of natural, mood-boosting remedies and a new diet.
The same year she and O’Neill split, she met professional stuntman Jonathan Goodman, 44, over Twitter (X).
They had only spoken online or over the phone until they met for the first time in Vienna that August – and got engaged half an hour into their first date.
But they were together for only two months when tragedy struck. He had an accident during a stunt rehearsal for America’s Got Talent: Extreme that left him paralysed from the waist down and in a wheelchair.
When they appeared on Loose Women together later, Jonathan admitted he would have understood if Amanda had walked away from their relationship, but she never considered it. They plan to marry next year. Her loyalty is admirable, but the trauma must have had an impact.
Could the challenges that Amanda has faced over the years have played some part in the breakdown of her dancing partnership with Giovanni?
There will, almost certainly, be a day of reckoning for the BBC over the scandal.
There is much criticism, certainly from Giovanni’s side, that the lack of psychological testing of celebrities during the screening process has been a contributing factor to the fall out.
Giovanni certainly believes Amanda should not have been paired with him because of concerns for her mental health.
Her father, however, says that the BBC simply didn’t act quickly enough and deal with her complaints. ‘She was told a couple of times ‘We’ll sort it out, do not worry about it Amanda,’ when she complained and nothing happened.’
The verdict of the BBC’s investigation, which began in April, is now just days away. The wait has been painful for all involved, Giovanni included.
He has seen his reputation damaged repeatedly by Amanda’s accusations, many of which he says are without evidence, and which he was never given the chance to respond to.
As her parents, John and Patsy obviously hope the decision goes their daughter’s way but what do they think of Giovanni?
Surprisingly, it isn’t what you’d think. ‘I’d feel sorry for him if Amanda wasn’t the one involved in this,’ says John.
‘Like other dancers on Strictly he was put in a situation where he was expected to train people when he’d not been taught how to train.
‘They were let out of dance school at a young age. Giovanni started at Strictly at 21 or 22. How on earth can you train people when you’ve not been trained to do that?’
As Patsy says, echoing the views of the nation and all concerned: ‘We just want it dealt with.’
Additional reporting Stephanie Condron
