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Privacy NoticeAt 62 and back on the dating scene, Vanessa Feltz needs just three words to describe her past relationships. “A car crash”, she says. “My entire love life has been a complete abomination, a catastrophe, an absolute f***ing car crash. People might think I’m an absolute fool. And they’d not be wrong.” That’s why today, speaking from her stunning north London home, she’s made herself a promise: to never be belittled or used for her fame by men again. It’s a lesson she’s learned the hard way. “I’ve been single for 21 months. It’s not my happy state,” Vanessa tells us. “But I’m not going to be plunging in with any old renegade who says ‘I like your eyes’. I’ve got to have learned something from all of this, haven’t I?”
Vanessa has been single for almost two years now
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
She endured a very public break up last year
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
The “this” to which she refers is her 2023 split with partner of 16 years Ben Ofoedu, after her daughters received a tip off that he was cheating. She confronted him while in the back of a black cab one night on their way to a party in Waterloo. After much spluttering and protestations of innocence, he finally confessed. Furious, Vanessa threw open the taxi door – and threw herself out into the rain. Her ‘beloved’ fiance drove on to the party. The same “this” also refers to her ex-husband, the father of her children, orthopaedic surgeon Michael Krurer, who after 16 years of seemingly-blissful marriage, turned round one day, asked for a divorce and called her “disgustingly fat”. He put her on a 12-week “trial period”, then walked out after six. Today Vanessa is happy to show us around her unique home – a 18th Century Gothic Folly she calls Feltz Towers. It’s packed full of eccentricities, including some faux Roman frescos which were there when she moved in 20 years ago. There’s a charming caricature of her in a fetish outfit on one wall and a side table etched with the face of Leigh Francis. The dining table has been folded away for the time being to make floor space for parties. But one thing you won’t find in there much is….Vanessa.
Vanessa’s 18th Century home is affectionately named Feltz Towers
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
Sign up to OK!’s daily newsletter to get updates sent to your inbox for free She reveals she’s actually spent 635 of the 636 nights since her split with her fiancé, out on the town. “Weeks before my sixty-first birthday I was solo again and couldn’t hack it,” she says. “Netflix binge, take up weaving? Fat chance. So, I went out instead.” She’s had lots of support from close friends, including Myleene Klass, Linda Robson and Holly Willoughby. And amazingly, she hasn’t given up on love – just “wannabes”. “I hope one day Cupid will pierce me with his arrow and I will find true love again. However, I’m not prepared to settle. My last relationship has put me off dating a wannabe. I’ve had enough of being somebody’s access-all-areas lanyard.” So how did this witty, intelligent woman manage to kiss so many frogs? She’s invited us into her home ahead of the release of her memoir Vanessa Bares All. Writing it, she admits, has given her time to reflect. And she can say with absolute certainty: she’s been badly let down by nearly every man in her life. Her ex-fiancé, who she now nicknames ‘One Hit Wonder’, was just the latest. The pair’s relationship had faced scrutiny since they first met – over the chocolate fountain at an OK! Christmas party in the late 2010s.
Vanessa has promised herself that she will never be used by a man again
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
She has also vowed to jump hastily into a new relationship
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
And looking back, she admits, she ignored the warning signs. So many times he wanted to be her plus one for showbiz events. But then he would stay on to go partying alone. Over the years she had been contacted multiple times by people – usually via social media – making claims about his bad behaviour. Yet he nearly always managed to explain them away. On January 14, 2023, she and her fiancé were putting on a brave face at a dinner in a west end restaurant with her daughters and grandchildren. They had had a silly row earlier in the day, yet Vanessa had promised to go with him to a party in Waterloo straight after the family dinner. Her beau clearly couldn’t wait to get to the bash. He had hailed black cab (via an app on his phone) before she’d even finished eating – or paid. Her daughters, fed up at the way Ben treated her, couldn’t keep quiet any longer. This time, they had been tipped off by an online troll about him playing away. And as he hurried Vanessa away, Saskia and Allegra blurted it out.
Vanessa says she’d been a ‘loving, loyal partner’ to Ben
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
Shocked, Vanessa got into the waiting taxi, then confronted her beau. “He was stuttering – he wasn’t making sense.” Eventually he admitted he had been messaging another woman – which Vanessa later discovered had been going on at least a year. That’s when she took drastic action. “I opened the door of the moving taxi and jumped. My coat was torn. Blood was seeping from a cut on my arm,” she says. “I assumed he’d stop the cab to see if I’d survived the leap. He didn’t.” Instead Ben, now 52, mistakenly sent her a string of texts meant for the other woman – then posted Instagram pictures of him partying at a club. She changed the locks that night and has not seen him since. Vanessa, understandably, would prefer never to speak his name again. So she calls him ‘One Hit Wonder’ (OHW), a reference to his band, Phats and Smalls, and their 1999 tune Turn Around. He has been disappointingly vocal about her, however.
Vanessa won’t compromise on what she wants in a relationship
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
“I tried to take the high ground and not say anything, but it’s made me pretty miserable,” Vanessa tells us. “Especially as I had loved this person. And I think I’d been a loving, loyal partner. I don’t think I’d done anything to deserve that.” She could say the same about the way her first husband had treated her. She married Michael, the father of daughters – child therapist Saskia, now 35, and solicitor Allegra, now 38 – in 1985. For 16 years Vanessa thought they were blissfully happy. Then one Sunday in September 1999, he blindsided her. “I was joking about being broody,” she recalls. “Then out of nowhere, he said in a Dalek-like voice: ‘I-do-not-rule-out-the-possibility-of-a-divorce’. She asked the only question she could: “why?”. His reply was chilling. “‘You’re just so fat. It’s hideous. I keep waiting for you to get diabetes’.” The star went into shock. “I couldn’t breathe,” she recalls. A few days later Michael outrageously offered her a 12-week “trial” period to save the marriage. He never explained the criteria on which she would be ‘judged’. But given his earlier outburst, she decided to get as thin as possible fast as she could. She survived on apples, hard-boiled eggs, and fewer than 300 calories a day while training seven days a week. “I had to win the trial,” Vanessa explains. “Saskia was 10 and Allegra was 14. This wasn’t a challenge I could fail.”
Vanessa says she’ll never forgive her daughters’ father for the way he ended their marriage
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
Six weeks in, she had dropped at least a dress size, if not more. They went together to her cousin’s wedding, she wore a stunning black and white dress, they danced and chatted. She thought they might be getting over the blip. But later that night, he suddenly jumped up out of bed. He grabbed a suitcase, packed it there and then, and left. It turned out he’d been having an affair with a colleague. The next day, he returned to inform his bewildered daughters their parents no longer loved each other and he was moving out. His cold, matter-of-fact delivery left the girls distraught – something that Vanessa can never forgive. “I think one can forgive on one’s own behalf. But I feel very differently about anyone who does anything to my children,” she says ardently. “Especially the person who’s meant to love them the most in the world. So I cannot feel that I can forgive. I don’t feel that I can forgive anybody who does anything to cause my children pain and shock and grief and thoroughly destabilise them.”
Vanessa is fiercely protective when it comes to her daughters Saskia and Allegra
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
It was Vanessa’s grandmother who introduced the eligible doctor Michael to Vanessa – having met him when he treated her in hospital. Vanessa was 22 and had just graduated with a degree in English Literature from Cambridge. Raised in a north London Jewish family, she’d been taught marriage was the ultimate achievement. Ten weeks later, she and the doctor were engaged. Just a few hours after she said yes, her mother Valerie had booked the wedding hors d’oeuvres. Three months after that, Vanessa was expecting Allegra. “I never felt I had the luxury of waiting,” she explains. “I felt that everything was incredibly urgent and it was particularly urgent to find a partner, to get married and then to have another partner when my husband walked out on me. I would have got married the next morning if I could have found someone!” Vanessa’s quick to stress she loved her now late parents. “I don’t think they were bad people. I just think their parenting skills could have done with sharpening up”. But they were tough to please. And while she accepts full responsibility for all her life choices, she admits the insecurities she developed in childhood may have played a part in some of her more questionable decisions. Vanessa has been happily talking us through her wardrobe and showing us around. But the mask has dropped. Suddenly a lot about the woman who appears so bubbly and strong-willed on the outside but ends up in unwise, unsatisfying relationships, starts to make sense.
Vanessa says she was desperate for her parents’ approval
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
She remained desperate for approval until her parents passed away. “I never stopped wanting to please them. I don’t know why I didn’t stop and think, ‘well, I’m never going to please them so they can just shove off’,” she smiles. “I do think quite a lot of what’s happened to me – and I take full responsibility, has to do with the upbringing, which was all about ‘you MUST get married, if it’s the last thing you do. Hurry up!’ “That’s not an exaggeration. So it’s that feeling of, ‘please choose me, for God’s sake’. Not, ‘Well, I might not choose you, actually. I don’t actually like you….’ And that’s not a good way to live.” She’s certainly learned some lessons. For Vanessa, a devoted grandmother to Zekey, Neroli, AJ and Cecily, she admits she’d trade her “rollicking’ career for a happy relationship. “Could I, or would I, have chosen a career over a lasting, happy marriage? Definitely not,” she says, ruefully. “I still wouldn’t. I’d rather have a happy family life.”
But she’s not prepared to go down the dating app route to find her next relationship
(Image: OK! Magazine / Alex James)
It’s her belief in love that’s seen her back dating. She refuses apps for fear of making headlines, so her matches have been made through friends – with mixed success so far. “First was the extremely orthodox chap with a penchant for nightclubs,” she reveals. They enjoyed four months of “wining, dining and writhing about in the boudoir” until he boasted about hooking up with another woman at a wedding – to her friend’s brother. Other dates have included a property developer who showed her pictures of his dead mother on their first date, and an ex from 1974 who she realised was still “a pill”. It’s a sitcom in the making. But she doesn’t feel she’s asking for too much. “I’ve always known what I want. It’s just hard to find,” she smiles. “It’s a certain something, maybe confidence, or humour. So that’s what I’m looking for… Someone who’s engaged, articulate and interested.” Vanessa Bares All: Frank, Funny and Fearless, by Vanessa Feltz (Transworld, £22), published October 24. https://linktr.ee/vanessabaresallStory SavedYou can find this story in My Bookmarks.Or by navigating to the user icon in the top right.Follow OK! MagazineFacebookTwitterCommentMore OnVanessa FeltzThis Morning
