Daniella Westbrook: aan de coke tijdens bevalling

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Exclusive: Danniella Westbrook: My Story - Part 2 of the book they all wanted

I woke up in a white room and thought I'd died

Rock-bottom Danniella Westbrook came round from a drug-crazed stupor thinking she was DEAD and in heaven.

The cocaine-ravaged EastEnders star woke in a strange all-white room and panicked.

She reveals: “I thought, “Oh my God, that’s it. I’m dead.’”

In fact she was in the tough Cottonwood rehab centre in Tucson, Arizona. And her long haul back from the brink of self-destruction was just beginning.

In part two of our sensational serialisation of Danniella’s autobiography , The Other Side Of Nowhere, she tells how she:
# Was locked in a padded cell for four days after a crazed tantrum
# Swapped drugs secretly with fellow addicts in secret to get the buzz she still craved
# Wept in despair because her beloved son Kai, four, had been sent to live with his dad, and being placed back with his no good drug-dealing father’ and
# Begged to go Back to rehab after a nervous breakdown at the airport.

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Girl, interrupted

Ex-EastEnder Danniella Westbrook has been coked up, detoxed and rehabbed so often it's hard to keep up. Now she's keeping the famous nose clean for ever - and having it fixed to celebrate.

Even before we meet, I am seriously irritated by Danniella Westbrook. Half the press stories about her begin something like this: 'Danniella Westbrook looks fantastic in short shorts and a midriff-skimming top, lightly tanned by the Spanish sun. It is hard to believe that a few months ago she was wrecked by drugs and hell-bent on suicide.' (The Daily Express, 8 June 1995.) The other half are more like this (News of the World, 1998): ' EastEnders star Danniella Westbrook is leading a sickening double life - as a death-dealing drug baron's moll.'

It's hard to keep up. Clean or cokehead? Fresh out of rehab or spending £400 a day on drugs? She has agreed to be interviewed today because she is the subject of a Channel 4 documentary in which she claims... well, that she's come out of rehab, found love and is about to have her nose repaired. For four years, her nose has been a tabloid obsession. She is missing what everyone always describes as her septum, but she insists is actually her colonna.

For two of those years she continued in EastEnders. Cast and crew had to perform around the missing nose - avoiding, for example, filming from below. But in June 2000 she was snapped by a paparazzo leaving an awards ceremony and the missing septum/colonna was suddenly public knowledge. At the end of that year, in a television interview with Martin Bashir, she promised the resulting picture had shocked her into cleaning up. Six weeks later, on television again in The Priory, she appeared drawn, hyperactive and distracted.

The team behind the new Channel 4 film appear to have set out to follow her as she underwent surgery to repair her nose and prepared to marry her boyfriend of four years, Kevin Jenkins. The wedding, last December, made it into the film, but not the op. 'Yeah, it was supposed to be done in January, wasn't it?' Westbrook admits at the end of shooting. 'Now it's planned for the end of February.' To me she says: 'I've just finished seeing the surgeon, and I'm going to start the first part in two weeks' time.'

Westbrook says her motivation in making the documentary wasn't particularly to cover the operation - 'I wanted to do a piece about what it's like to live as an addict, about what I was like as a using addict and what I'm like now.' She says she's been clean since 15 March last year; and, certainly - at the risk of sounding like the Daily Express - her hair is glossy, and her cornflower-blue eyes are bright. You can't really see that part of her nose is missing without staring rudely (she has developed a slight Princess Di tilt, to avoid displaying it). And she is prettier than she seems in photographs because she's a chatterbox and likes a laugh, is self-deprecating and vivid.

She's not stupid, either, although recovery has given her a story which she has dutifully internalised in order to make enough sense of her life to move on. So you sometimes feel as though you're getting the authorised, therapy-speak version. 'I didn't come from a dysfunctional family. I made my family dysfunctional with the way I acted... I want people to understand that addiction is a disease that tells me that I haven't got anything wrong with me, when that's just not the case.'

But, though Daniella is smart, there remain inconsistencies. She talks at one point about how she now speaks to every member of her family every day. Her younger brother, she says, has forgiven her 'for what I done to him, though I can't forgive myself'. This is probably true, but not perhaps the complete story. 'I've hated her and detested her,' Jason says in the film. 'I've gone through every emotion, I think. I don't know whether I've got any left.'

Then there's the issue of how she got into detox. To me, talking about her dreadful appearance on The Priory , she says that by then she had already asked her mother to take care of her son. 'I'd given Kai to my mum before that. I told her, "I'm really not well and I need to go on this home detox." ' But her manager, Cheryl Barrymore, claims that following the appearance on The Priory , 'she overdosed in my house. Kai kept kissing the top of her head. She turned blue and her feet turned purple. I actually thought she was dying.'

Barrymore says she put Westbrook into a car, took her to a flat and organised a two-week home detox. But Danniella tells me: 'I just couldn't cope any more and I went to my doctor and he said, "Look, I'll give you two weeks to live if you carry on using coke. But you can start today and do a home detox programme. I'll come to your house this evening with the medication." And that's what he did.'

None of this is exactly contradictory: she collapsed, saw a doctor and started a home detox. But it doesn't quite fit together either. Of course, a lot of the time, Danniella was probably too far out of it to know precisely what was going on. But I think there's another reason for the inconsistencies. As a pretty, young, drug-addicted soap star, Danniella Westbrook has always been a tabloid story. And in that smoke and mirrors world, the nature of the story didn't matter, so long as it was a new angle and had superficial coherence. She's clean, she's not clean - who cares? All that cynical journalists really want, she has learnt, is something that hangs together.

She said in the documentary, and it was also reported in the press, that when she gets her nose fixed, she's going to take the opportunity to get her breasts enlarged. To me, she confirms that she's intending to have her implants changed 'because I've got a lot of pain with this - it's soya oil, and they can't screen for breast cancer; they can't see behind the bag. But no, I'm not having great big knockers. They're going to be exactly the same.'

In spite of this, though, I find I want to believe in this recovery. There may be superficial flaws, but Danniella's story has an underlying emotional coherence. She is, I think, genuinely besotted with her husband Kevin, a self-made millionaire who owns the courier service Premier Despatch and appears to have stood by her with great stoicism. She clearly adores her kids. And she is disarmingly emotionally articulate.

Westbrook was born in Walthamstow 28 years ago, and grew up in Loughton. Her father was a cab driver, later a carpet contractor; her mother worked in a shop. 'I came from a very loving family - you know, 2.4 children with a Volvo - and I was very horsey. I used to ride every weekend. But I always wanted to be famous. My mum and dad thought I'd grow out of it, but I didn't.' She went to Sylvia Young Theatre School on Saturdays from the age of eight and, when she was 12, her parents agreed that she could attend full time.

She had her first line of coke at 14, in a nightclub. 'I always thought drugs'd kill you; I had this image in my brain that it was only pimps and prostitutes. And I was out somewhere, and I took it, like someone would take their first cigarette. I think in the beginning it made me more confident, and then it got to the point where I thought I couldn't go out clubbing or whatever without it. And then towards the middle and end of my using it was the loneliest thing I've ever had in my life, paying to be in pain, to sit on my own in a room and be paranoid.'

Shortly before her sixteenth birthday, Danniella was cast as Sam Mitchell in EastEnders . 'From then it was all fast cars, flash clothes, flash blokes, lovely flat - I had a popstar boyfriend [Brian Harvey of East 17] and it was all good for a short while. But I was always in clubs and everyone was doing coke and it was glamorous - except obviously, it wasn't at all. I was just very young, very stupid and very easily led. The original dumb blonde.' She laughs. 'Well, it's true, isn't it?'

Being in recovery is all about taking responsibility for your own addiction; so it's significant that she goes as far as she does: 'I think there should be someone at EastEnders to say to young people when they come in, "Look, your life is about to change, you're going to be invited to things, and you'll be offered drugs." Someone who can tell them what sort of people are about, and what sort of papers, and how quickly what you've worked for all those years can be gone.'

By the age of 21, she was spending £400 a day on cocaine. 'But a lot of that, I was so paranoid, I'd put it down the toilet. I thought the police were going to come to my door.' At the worst time, she remembers sitting in a room alone and thinking that she'd already seen Richard and Judy that morning, only to realise that she'd been there for 24 hours. In 1994 she attempted suicide. Her relationship with Brian Harvey fell apart. In 1996 she gave birth to Kai, her son by Robert Fernandez, later the subject of a News of the World sting for dealing drugs.

In 1998 she married Ben Morgan, a van driver, eight weeks after she'd met him at a petrol station. 'It was a really bad thing and to me it's really embarrassing,' she says now. 'I knew he was the wrong person, I knew I didn't want to marry him, but I was so anxious for Kai, and desperate to get away from the people I was mixing with.' They tried to start afresh in Australia but it didn't work out. Ben and his mother subsequently sold their story to the News of the World, where it appeared under the headline 'Danniella pawns hoover to buy cocaine'.

She took coke throughout her pregnancy with Kai, and for the first two and a half months that she was expecting Jodie, who will be a year old in September. 'When you're an addict you're an addict.' She shrugs. 'I've just been really lucky that they're both fine.' Perhaps there is only so much pain one can bear to parade in public.

It was, she says, the prospect of losing her children that finally made her clean up; if it had been threatened sooner, it might have been a good thing: 'If I'd had a nine-to-five job, I know I wouldn't have kept my son. Somebody would have stepped in sooner. He was never in danger. But for me, personally, it would have been the only thing that would have broken me.'

After the home detox, she spent four weeks in a clinic in Tucson, Arizona, and six weeks as an outpatient in Florida. Kevin, a recovering alcoholic, stuck by her throughout. The couple have recently bought a West End restaurant, named it after their daughter, and plan that it will open on her birthday in September. 'I know that if I even pick up a phone to a dealer, that's it. I haven't got a relapse left in me. And I just look at what I've done this year. I've been a proper mum to my kids, I'm awake with them in the morning. We make cakes and we play in the garden and we ride bikes. I love being a mum. And the only thing that makes me different from any other mum is my nose.'

The proposed operation will entail the insertion of a latex bag into Danniella's forehead. 'They'll fill it with water twice a week for a few weeks and it sort of comes out, but only slightly, because I said I didn't want to look like a Klingon.' A pocket of flesh forms around it, 'and then they go in from the scalp and use the spare flesh to rebuild the lining. It's the only way they can do it without giving me a great big scar, taking a flap from somewhere on my face.' Once the repair has settled, the last phase of surgery resculpts the nostrils.

Another actress now plays Sam in EastEnders, but Danniella is hoping to return to acting. She says she was offered possible parts in the next series of Footballers' Wives and Bad Girls, but she'll still be in the middle of her nose job when they start filming. 'I do sometimes worry about life being boring,' she says. 'I get up and I think, "Shall I go shopping in Bluewater again today?" - so I go out and play with the dogs. And then I think, "I'm a bit bored; shall I go and have lunch somewhere?" '

Clearly, she could do with some work. But if she had returned to EastEnders, 'I would have been doing it to be famous, and I realise that's part of my addiction.' Once the documentary has appeared, she intends not to talk about cocaine any more. 'I wanted to do this to shut the door on everything. It's my way of finishing with it. And I'm going to get my nose done, because I hate it so much, and it's going to stay like that for ever.' I sincerely hope that every single bit of this is true.