‘I don’t like him. I resent him for what he’s done’: HELEN FLANAGAN opens up on her hellish three years with ex Scott Sinclair, his nasty move that’s left her furious – and the psychotic episode that had her fearing for her life

Helen Flanagan is at home on a Sunday morning, wearing a big old jumper slung over her pyjamas. Her blonde hair is tied back in a scrunchie, her pretty face is make-up free, she has a tiger tattooed on the ring finger of her left hand. What’s that all about? The former Coronation Street star holds it up to the Zoom camera so I can see it better. ‘It reminds me to be brave,’ she says. Roarrr!

Today she is upbeat and happy – but also in constant need of encouragement and validation. Had I read her book, did I like it, what would people think, what did I think, what did I think they will think, and so forth.

Where to begin? Head & Heart is 35-year-old Flanagan’s new autobiography, a 300-page chronicle of her sudsy paddle through soap celebrity, her mental-health battles, her calamitous love life, her skirmishes with reality TV, her current situation as a single mother of three young children, and her new role in a play, The Memory Of Water, which opens at Bolton’s Octagon Theatre on Thursday. ‘My character is this wild, feral woman who is erratic and has a bit of a man addiction, which isn’t hard for me to play,’ she says, poking fun at herself.

Except that it’s not really a joke. Flanagan suffers from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder) and OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). ‘All the Ds,’ she says. ‘And I didn’t even know I had OCD until I read a book about it.’

She had a full-blown breakdown at the beginning of 2024, which she believes was triggered by a bad reaction to medication for her ADHD. In the grip of a powerful psychotic episode, she became convinced men were trying to break into her house and that her neighbour was trying to kill her.

For a month afterwards, her parents became primary carers for her children while Flanagan, who had dropped out of playing Miss Scarlett in a touring theatre production of Cluedo 2, attended sessions at the Priory. She has since recovered and no longer takes any medication, relying instead upon regular cognitive behavioural therapy sessions with her two therapists.

She also suffered from increasingly severe hyperemesis gravidarum during her three pregnancies, the same vomiting condition that affected Catherine, Princess of Wales. Everything seems to be linked to Flanagan’s hormones, which burn like a furnace inside her soul. ‘I was a ticking time bomb of emotional chaos,’ is how she describes herself at one low point. She also says there is a history of mental illness in her family. In Head & Heart she makes several references to her elder brother Tom’s difficulties but only says to me, ‘It’s his story to tell.’

Her story is something else; a carousel of psychotic episodes, couples in throuples, treatment at the Priory, suicidal ideation, experiences with the celebrity dating app Raya (she’s still on it) and men behaving badly in general. Part memoir and part horror show, there are moments when you admire her pluck and resolve, others when you find yourself silently screaming, ‘Don’t do it, Helen!’ Usually when she puts on some lippy, gaily climbs aboard another pair of Louboutins, then heads off into the night and certain disaster.

Like the time in 2023 when she accepted an invitation from David Haye to join him and his girlfriend Sian Osborne at a boxing event at Wembley Arena. Flanagan was having a passionate affair with the famously polyamorous boxer, who was always trying to recruit her to join him in a throuple, apparently to no avail. ‘I’m not a prude, but I’ve never been into that – it was David I liked,’ she writes. Yet instead of staying home, what did Flanagan do? ‘I put on a sexy little corseted leather dress from Agent Provocateur and headed to the Arena.’

Oh, god.

I note that in her book she is careful not to actually deny any throuple action, but she certainly does so here. ‘The relationship that I had with David was just David on his own. My evenings were just spent with him, that’s what only ever happened,’ she says.

So just to clarify, you were never in a throuple with David Haye and his long- term partner Sian Osborne?

‘No, no, no, not at all.’

Haye appears to have been awful to Flanagan: a classic gaslighter, controlling. Yet she writes of how she remained obsessed with him and once bought him a Cartier Trinity bracelet (three gold bands wound together – should we see any significance?) for his birthday and personally delivered it to his hotel, despite his appalling behaviour. What made you do that, I ask?

She bursts into tears.

‘Did I put that in the book? Oh, god, that actually makes me cry. I don’t know. Sorry. It’s really hard. That is a little bit embarrassing. Why did I do that? Because I wanted him to love me properly.’ She cries some more. ‘It was such a toxic situation. Since then, I’ve learnt to love myself. To be a stronger woman.’

Today she lives in a six-bedroom McMansion just outside her hometown of Bury, furnished in 50 shades of grey and featuring a Wag-tastic dressing room complete with shelves that once groaned with her designer handbag collection.

‘I had a Birkin, you know,’ she says. Yet a few years ago she had to sell most of them to cope with ‘a looming tax bill’. She is hopeless with money, she says, but still ‘does all right’, guided by her agent Robin, who is not really an agent, but a photographer. In the book she thanks him for his kindness and for ‘always having my best interests at heart’.

The house is owned by her ex-fiancé, footballer Scott Sinclair – the father of her children, the man whose name is tattooed on her upper thigh but from whom she has been separated since 2022. ‘He’s a d**khead, but I will always have love for him,’ she says, which I interpret as a valiant attempt at diplomacy for the sake of their children, Matilda, ten, Delilah, seven, and Charlie, four.

However, it is not long before she is telling me, ‘I don’t like him, I don’t think we like each other. It has been hellish, very challenging. It has left me in a difficult place financially. I have bit my tongue for three and a half years, Jan. We have a very bad relationship. We only communicate through my father now. There is so much worse I could say.’

Over Christmas she publicly criticised him on social media for failing to turn up to Charlie’s nativity play. ‘Women are sometimes supposed to keep quiet but why should we? I was so cross.’ She sees herself as the main breadwinner now and sometimes has to ‘take jobs I wouldn’t usually do’ to pay the bills. ‘And being away from my children gives me a lot of mum guilt, too. So, I can’t forgive Scott for stealing a lot of my time with my children. I resent him for that.’

No doubt Sinclair has his own version of events, but reading the book I did note his lack of sympathy after Flanagan was hospitalised following a bad bout of her pregnancy sickness. ‘If I had hyperemesis gravidarum,’ he told her, ‘I’d just get on with it.’ She says he also failed to comfort her after masked robbers targeted their home 13 years ago, when he was away in Dubai. They locked up Flanagan in the utility room, a terrifying ordeal. ‘When he came back, instead of putting his arms around me, he was more angry that his watches were stolen,’ she writes. Today, despite all the rooms in their home, Flanagan and the children sleep in one bedroom, Charlie in the same bed as her.

When Flanagan and Sinclair first met in 2009, she was still playing Rosie Webster in Coronation Street and he was with Wigan Athletic. A soap star and a Premier League footballer? They were a glam couple on the up, a WAG dream come true. However, it is fair to say their mutual celebrity and earning power have long since peaked. These days Flanagan seems to make most of her money modelling saucy outfits online for Ann Summers, appearing in panto or reality shows (notably I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! in 2012 and Celebs Go Dating in 2024), while at 36 he is without a club after being released by Bristol Rovers at the end of the 2024-25 season.

Sinclair has put the huge family home on the market, a development Flanagan is not happy about. She is upset by the viewings and the cleaning teams he sends in without consulting her. ‘I have no control,’ she complains. The house could be sold at any minute, I say to her, where are you moving to, what is the plan?

‘I don’t know,’ she says, shrugging. She says she’d like to move to London to help her acting career but doesn’t think it’s feasible because she ‘couldn’t afford a nanny’. She relies heavily on her parents, who live 15 minutes away, for childcare. I’m fond of Flanagan but now it’s my turn to bite my tongue at this laissez-faire attitude. Put that tiger tattoo energy in your tank, girl. Get a grip.

Helen Flanagan has always been a very British sort of star: the busty beauty from Bury, catnip to tabloids, lads’ mag darling, mean-girl target. Born in 1990 at the Royal Bolton Hospital, she was raised in a tight-knit family by Julia, a stay-at-home mum, and dad Paul, an electrician.

The third of four children, Flanagan grew to be a confident, bubbly child who enjoyed summer holidays to Eurocamp and trips to Tammy Girl on a Saturday. Yet at school she was deeply unhappy, bullied for the way she looked, and she displayed early signs of OCD.

Performing was an escape, and she got her start at the Carol Godby Theatre Workshop in Bury, a launchpad for young actors from the North West. She joined Coronation Street when she was nine and left when she was 21.

As a teenager on the show she was – notoriously – sexualised to a degree that’s unthinkable today. I was a big Corrie fan at the time and, like many, I was appalled at the Rosie storylines. The show’s producers put her in vixen outfits – plunge tops, a basque and suspenders – and made her character have an affair with a teacher, then try to seduce a factory boss in his 40s. In all these scenarios, teenage Rosie was portrayed as the temptress and the orchestrator, always the scheming plaything of much older men.

‘Was it morally right that I was expected to parade about in my knickers like some mad nymphomaniac when I was still just a teenager?’ Flanagan asks in the book. Good question. She says today: ‘I was 16, I wasn’t really aware of anything. I liked the idea of being sexy because I think you do when you’re young, but you don’t really understand it.’

In rehearsals for her new play, she was amazed to be introduced to an intimacy coordinator by producers. ‘They said, “Oh, Helen, an intimacy coordinator is coming in.” And I said, why? “Just to make sure that you’re OK about everything.” Oh, wow. So this is how we do things now! It is so different, so very different.’

However, it cannot be denied that Flanagan did make the most of her sexy fame. This was back in the era of FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women, the Sexiest Female award at the British Soap Awards, and so on. With her Elizabeth Hurley cleavage and rosebud pout, Flanagan was nominated time after time.

Today on Instagram she shares a curious mix of wholesome family photos and overtly sexual sponsored content for the likes of Ann Summers with her 1.1 million followers; in one recent video, she unlaces a red negligee while confessing in a letter to Santa that she’s been a ‘very naughty girl’.

She doesn’t see any hypocrisy in posing in her sexy outfits. ‘I feel more comfortable about it now, I think it’s fine if you are in control,’ she says. ‘It’s nice for women to celebrate themselves and feel beautiful, feel sexy, feel powerful.’

To this end, she recently had a boob job to keep her embonpoint looking tip-top. She’s not thrilled that I bring this up. ‘I don’t know why my boob job gets talked about so much because it’s such a normal thing to have,’ she says. ‘I mean, lots of my friends have had them.’

Have they?

‘Yes. And after breastfeeding three children, I wanted to feel sexy again. But I don’t like the attention it gets. I really hate this whole blonde bimbo title I have attached to me,’ she says, warming to her theme.

‘Maybe it’s my ADHD. Sometimes I think without speaking. I mean speak without thinking. But I know who I am. I’m not just the “get the boobs out” girl. And I think my children will always have respect for me, because all they see is their mum working hard to provide for them.’

Despite everything she’s been through, it is rather touching that Flanagan still believes in a happy ever after. She says she had ‘a nice little time’ with someone she met on Raya over Christmas but has little space in her schedule to date. ‘And sometimes, when people do get close to you, if they sense that sometimes you struggle with your head a bit, they kind of back off. I find that quite hurtful.’

Yet she has learnt to love herself.

She is a stronger woman. She’s got a tiger tattoo and the heart of a lion. ‘In ten years’ time,’ she says, ‘I think I will have a lovely husband; a man who will be my best friend. By the time I am 45 I think my life will be peaceful and that I will be really, really happy.’

Head & Heart by Helen Flanagan (Mirror Books, £22) is published on Thursday. To order a copy for £18.70 until February 8, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25

Styling: Joanne M Kennedy

Fashion assistant: Naomi Begarin

Hair: Federico Ghezzi using Bumble and Bumble

Make-up: Caroline Barnes