The star 37, admits she turned her life around with the help of Jamie Horn, 28, who she met on Tinder
LOCKED in her dressing room hurling abuse at staff through the door after walking off stage during a West End performance, Sheridan Smith seemed set on a path of destruction.
Reeling from her father’s cancer diagnosis, Sheridan had begun turning up late for her starring role in musical Funny Girl — and on this car-crash night, began slurring her words before marching out.
She then dropped out of the show amid fears from her loved ones for her well-being.
But now Sheridan insists that’s all behind her — thanks to the unlikely love of a toyboy she met on Tinder.
In an incredibly candid interview to be broadcast on Sunday, the 37-year-old reveals how she’s turned her life around with the help of the man of her dreams, Jamie Horn, 28.
During a trip back to her hometown of Doncaster on ITV’s Sheridan Smith: Coming Home, she announces: “I think I’m the happiest I’ve been right now. Eating a sausage, chips and gravy with the love of my life and my new puppy.”
The Sun revealed how Sheridan and Jamie, who met on the dating app, had got engaged in May after a whirlwind three-month romance.
Sheridan told pals she had finally met her “prince” after a string of failed romances.
They included small-time Hollyoaks star Greg Wood, her hair stylist Graham Nation, and, last year, even WWE wrestler Stuart Tomlinson.
In Sunday’s documentary, Sheridan returns with insurance broker Jamie and her dog Dumbo to the Yorkshire hotel room where he proposed.
Pointing to the bed, she says to Jamie: “It was on that bed.
“I’d just come out the shower and you laid where Dumbo is sat. I came out the shower and you went . . . ”
Jamie chimes in: “‘You going to marry me or what?’ I pulled it out the bag, I thought it’s a big day. It felt natural, it was effortless, that’s how I felt about it. You probably thought ‘lazy bastard’.”
Jamie had already secretly asked Sheridan’s mum Marilyn for her daughter’s hand during a trip to Blackpool ahead of the proposal.
He admits: “That was scarier than doing the real thing. Honestly, that was the most nerve-wracking thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.”
Before she met Jamie in February, Sheridan seemed to be struggling to hold her life together.
Fears for the star’s health first began after the news of her father Colin’s cancer diagnosis in March 2016 and things got worse when he passed away in December that year.
But even earlier this year, during a string of one-woman gigs, there were still fears for about her condition.
During the nine-date UK tour, astonished audiences saw Sheridan flash her knickers, give out her hotel room number and encourage them to get drunk in expletive-filled rants.
However since finding happiness with Jamie, Sheridan says she has “come out the other side” of her meltdown.
And things couldn’t look brighter for her future.
She’s got a new album, A Northern Soul, out today, big ITV drama Cleaning Up airing early next year and upcoming new Channel 4 series Adult Material to look forward to.
She says: “I kind of lost it a bit after [my dad] died. I’ve come out the other side now and I need to get it all out through my music. Especially in the public, it looks like I’ve moaned about everything with my Dad dying but that’s not the case, I just had a massive meltdown.
“As soon as my Dad got that diagnosis it was like ‘I’m not leaving your side, I’m not leaving you’ and my mum was like, ‘Well, you’ve got to get back, you’ve got the show, you can’t let people down’ and rightly so.
“I know what she is saying, people had bought tickets a year in advance and I hate letting people down.”
Sheridan’s parents, both former singers themselves, urged her to return to Funny Girl but when she did, things took a turn for the worse.
She says: “They’ve taught me that the show goes on, even if they’re ill and I get that but at the time I was like, ‘Hang on a minute, reality check, I don’t want to leave my dad’. My dad was saying the same, ‘Oh love, don’t worry about me’ but how can you not, he was my rock.
“I love my mum but I just didn’t want to go back but I went back and I got on the train to do the show and I thought, ‘I can’t do it’, it just felt so weird like, ‘How can I be here taking applause?’
“I just thought ‘I want to be sat with my dad, sat on his chair cuddling him. I ran away from that, I ran away from that situation.”
Sheridan dropped out of the show at the Savoy Theatre and was replaced for the rest of the run by her understudy Natasha Barnes.
However, she returned in 2017 for the UK tour of the show, alternating the role with Natasha. She admits in the documentary that playing parts like Cilla Black in the ITV biopic and Mrs Biggs, wife of the train robber, appeals because she can become somebody completely different from herself.
She says: “I still love acting because it’s being someone else . . . I’m just looking at these people and how I can create their mannerisms, their walk and their voice.
“So, to look at myself is terrifying, it is scary and something I guess I’ve run away from for a long time.”
During Sunday night’s hour-long special she performs at the Doncaster club her parents used to perform at, as well as visiting the home she grew up.
Speaking about her musical upbringing, she says: “I love music, I’ve grown up with music. My mum and dad were a country and western duo. I used to gig with them around all the clubs in Doncaster and all over the country to be fair.
“I remember at school I was kind of embarrassed because he [my dad] would pick me up with a cowboy hat on and a big moustache and I felt so uncool and now I think it’s the coolest thing ever.” While visiting her mum Marilyn, she says she has turned a corner in her grief and can think about her mum’s own struggle.
She explains: “I feel like it’s time now to stop thinking about myself and moaning about my grief and all that. It’s like, what she’s been going through and we should be standing strong together.
“We’re always close, we text and whatever but it’s different to going home, give her a big cuddle, let her hear the songs..”
She visits the grave of her older brother Julian, who died of cancer when he was 18 and she was eight.
Sheridan, who also has another older brother, Damian recalls: “He got really ill all of a sudden and then was laid on the couch for a good couple of years.
“When he passed, it was kind of like he was there one minute and gone the next. It was a very strange and very surreal time as a kid.
I do admire my mum. How do you deal with that? She lost her eldest son, her first born. I can’t imagine what that must be like.”
Despite her troubles over the past few years Sheridan l believes the public are still on her side.
She adds: “I’ve come out the other side and I think people are very forgiving of all that, even though it’s all been in the public eye . . . Everyone has wobbles in life, don’t they?”
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