Actress, presenter and TV chef Lisa Faulkner was just 16 years old when she lost her mum to throat cancer.
She was on her way to see her at the Royal Marsden Hospital when she was first scouted to be a model while waiting on the Tube station platform.
Lisa makes no bones about it: modelling saved her. It took her out of school, distracted her from wanting to “party”, and placed her among professionals.
A dozen or so years later, she married EastEnders star Chris Coghill. In the aftermath of that relationship, she experienced a “very dark time”, but she went on to marry John Torode and they have been happily together ever since.
Lisa Faulkner was 16 when her mum died
16 is a tough age to lose a parent, Lisa recalls. Her mum, Julie, was a legal secretary, but Lisa describes her as so much more.
She draws inspiration from her mum’s “charismatic personality and zest for life”. She was a “whirlwind, a firework, filling our house with good food, music, friends and laughter”, she wrote in the Mail in 2012. And losing her knocked her for six.
“You’re a teenager and want to go out,” she explained to the Metro that same year. “She’d been ill for a year and a half. We knew she was ill but we didn’t realise how serious it was.”
They were quite sheltered from it, she said, so when it happened it came as a real shock. The cancer had started out as something that looked like an ulcer under her mum’s tongue in 1987. At first, it baffled the family’s dentist. Then it spread to her throat and neck. Within two years, she had passed away.
“We didn’t think she was going to die,” she wrote in the Mail. She and her sister Victoria were at school when it happened.
“It was horrendous. Our dad, David, was incredible, and my sister and I became a team and faced everything in life together. We looked after Dad and each other and were determined to just carry on.”
She was on her way to visit her in hospital when she was scouted by a modelling agent
Starting out as a model probably saved her, she previously insisted. She wanted to go out partying as a means of escape, but being offered a modelling contract meant she had to sort herself out quickly.
A talent scout approached her while she was waiting on the Tube station platform for a train to take her to Royal Marsden Hospital to see her mum.
She describes losing a parent at a young age as an alienating experience, especially when there’s no one else at school who can relate to it.
However, kickstarting her modelling career “saved” her from having to go to school and “be surrounded by people who didn’t know what to say”.
To her colleagues, she could say simply that her mum had died. They needed no more explanation than that: the professionalism expected of everyone meant that personal lives were left at the door.
How losing her mum as a teenager ‘shaped’ Lisa Faulkner
Still, “there’s no getting over grief”, Lisa told Top Santé magazine in 2023, but she did realise she needed to “get on” with her own life. .
“You realise you need to get on with life, and having something completely new and different helped with that. What I took from my mum dying was an understanding that in life, you’ve got one chance. Even though she had been ill with cancer for a while, when she died I was so surprised.
“You just don’t think the end is going to happen. Losing her has completely shaped me. I didn’t want it to be something that defined me, but it has. It definitely made me think about how to live my life.”
John and Lisa’s Weekend Kitchen airs at 11:40am on Saturday (July 12) on ITV1.
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