Anthea Turner is turning 66 this month and shows no signs of slowing down – from launching a YouTube channel and her beauty brand By Anthea, and an upcoming wedding…
Anthea Turner turns 66 later this month, but has no intention of slowing down.
“I can take my pension this year so I could say I’m retired and have done with it, but I won’t,” she says. “My fame star rose through the 80s and I’m still here 40 years later. I’ve got so many things I still want to achieve.”
This year Anthea celebrates four decades in broadcasting and is the middle of a fresh career chapter. As co-founder of beauty brand By Anthea, a children’s author alongside her sister Wendy, and with a fiercely loyal 50-plus female Instagram following, she is now preparing to launch a YouTube channel.
“We’re an age group who want to get the best out of our years,” says Anthea. “The channel will be an extension of what I do already — exercising my passions for the home and lifestyle. Media is a big umbrella now. Work has to come from lots of different pockets.”
It’s a far cry from the late 90s when she lost that control almost overnight after entering a relationship with married property developer Grant Bovey. She was quickly labelled a “home wrecker”.
“I was ‘cancelled’ before we even had the word,” she recalls. “When I went through a difficult time, yes, I was absolutely pushed aside — over, done, I couldn’t get arrested.”
By the time “the clouds passed by” and she “walked forward again into the sunshine”, the TV industry had shifted too. “If you weren’t a gardener, a cook, an interior designer or an expert on history or wildlife, you were stuffed,” she recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my goodness me, that’s probably me done.’”
But she wasn’t. She appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2001 then landed the BBC show Anthea Turner: Perfect Housewife before competing in Dancing On Ice then The Jump, which coincided with the breakdown of her 15-year marriage to Grant. The time was hugely formative.
“After my divorce I met myself again,” she smiles. “The me I am now in my sixties is much closer to the one I was in my thirties, only now I have the golden ticket of experience. I did everything I could to keep my marriage to Grant together, but had I stayed in it I wouldn’t be the woman I am now with the freedom I have emotionally and professionally.”
That freedom now underpins everything, including her relationship with her hospitality businessman fiancé Mark Armstrong, who she has been engaged to since 2019 — a detail that often attracts headlines.
“I read about us repeatedly postponing the wedding but you can’t postpone something you haven’t organised,” she says. “We absolutely will get married because I believe in it, but life has got in the way. Covid, then Mark’s mum died, then home renovations. We dropped the ball, but we’ll pick it up again soon, don’t worry.”
Anthea remains “on good terms” with her ex-husbands, including her first, former BBC Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell. “There’s absolutely no bitterness. Grant and I had some great years, Peter and I had some great years,” she says. So will they be coming to the wedding?
“I’m not sure if Grant would come,” she says. “But I think Peter most definitely will.”
Ask Anthea what bonds her and Mark and she recalls a conversation she had with presenter Esther Rantzen shortly after her TV producer husband Desmond Wilcox died in September 2000. “She said to me, ‘I can go out every single night of the week, but what I miss is somebody to do nothing with.’ That’s the acid test of every relationship. Mark’s very social and luckily I’m not someone who says, ‘You’re going out again?’ We give each other loads of freedom. That’s the key.”
That ease is evident in her family life too. Anthea, who made peace with never having kids of her own following fertility struggles and IVF, is now “Granny Anth” to two boys — born to two of Grant’s three daughters, Claudia, Amelia and Lily, whom she considers her own. Baby Ford arrived in March to restaurant owner Lily, then there’s Dexter, Claudia’s one-year-old son.
“It’s about carving out time together,” Anthea says. “Everyone’s busy but you make space for what matters.”
A trip to Margate to visit Ford is happening soon, now Anthea is mobile after a painful few months following a fall down the stairs before Christmas, which left her with a torn shoulder tendon and needing surgery.
“The pain has been horrific,” she sighs. “You come out of surgery thinking you’re fine because of the nerve blockers, then suddenly — oh my God.”
Recovery has been a humbling experience. “I can’t blow dry my frickin’ hair!” she laughs, adding that “applying mascara is a nightmare”, as is putting on a bra. “You take all these things for granted.”
Yet she’s approaching it with her usual determination. “I do shoulder rolls [in the car] at traffic lights and use the steering wheel like a Pilates ring, just to keep everything moving and talk my tendons back into life.”
That same pragmatism is in her outlook on ageing. “You do the maths in your 60. You see your mortality,” she says. “It’s not ageing that bothers me. I just don’t want to be a weak old woman.”
For decades, health has been a major priority for Anthea, who walks, lifts weights and follows the Alexander Technique, a method to improve poise and flexibility, which she learned as a teenage ballerina growing up in Stoke-on-Trent. Her beauty philosophy is multi-layered too.
“I couldn’t find skincare that was natural, affordable yet luxurious so I created my own and it’s transformed my skin,” she says. “I’ve done Eva Fraser’s facial exercises since I was about 27 and, thankfully, I’ve got my dad’s defined chin. But I also have a tiny bit of filler in my apples and I have Botox regularly. I haven’t frowned since I was 40, which has made a difference because I never got lines in the first place.”
She denies that the driver for all this effort is fear. “It’s not about that. When you scrub up and go out, you feel better,” she says. “I’m my own business. It’s about maintaining, not chasing something I was.”
That said, her neck “doesn’t look quite like it used to” so she is not closed to the idea of “one day” plumping for a face lift, although Mark would likely object. “He’d probably laugh and go, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’”
As for her 66th birthday plans, nothing is set in stone. “We normally go to Rome but we haven’t worked it out,” she says. “There may be a dinner with friends but the chances are we will be on a plane — as long as there’s some aviation fuel hanging around.”
Global tensions, particularly the current conflict involving Iran, have made travel uncertain but Anthea refuses to spiral. “We have every right to feel concerned,” she says. “But do I feel unduly panicked that things won’t sort themselves out? No. This absolutely cannot escalate and cause the world more harm. We have to have optimism in human nature.”
Anthea’s natural positivity is evident in her social media accounts, where she connects daily to her “tribe”. “Through Instagram, I found my people and they found me,” she says, adding that being online sometimes has its absurd moments too.
“Of course you always get people sending you pictures of their bits and bobbies,” she laughs. “I just think, ‘Really?’ And when they send indecent proposals, I think, ‘Do you really think I’m going to go, ‘Yeah, take me out?’ It’s very odd.”
Still, the positives outweigh the negatives and her passion for television also remains. Earlier this year, Anthea returned to live broadcasting — the first time in three decades — standing in for Vanessa Feltz on her Channel 5 daytime show.
“I was scared witless,” shrieks Anthea. “But then it started and I realised I still knew how to drive the car. Now being an expert in life is what matters. I’m a standard-bearer for the scrubbed-up over-55s and I wear that mantle proudly.”
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