Lesley Garrett has had an extensive music career having graduated from the Royal Academy of Music and the National Opera Studio before winning the Decca Prize of the Kathleen Ferrier Award in 1979. The 64-year-old has travelled around the world singing opera and pop classics, eventually being awarded a CBE for her services to music in 2002. She married her GP husband Peter in 1991 and together the couple has two children: Jeremy and Chloe. But why does the successful singer and TV star, who is due to appear on Pointless Celebrities tonight and who seems to have the perfect life, say that her children are in fact “terrified” for her?
Lesley Garrett has achieved a great deal throughout her 50-year-career: recording 16 studio solo albums, writing three books and signing in several musicals in the West End and televised shows such as the Brit Awards.
But despite this impressive list of accomplishments, Ms Garrett said that she has been in emotional turmoil having suffered a series of deaths of close friends and relatives.
The singer told The Mirror: “The worst part of my life has been the last few years when people just keep dying. It was awful. I’ve lost both my parents.
“I try not to think about what killed my parents. There’s a lot of cancer in my family, both my grandmothers died of cancer.
“That’s why I pack so much work in and live life at 100mph now because you never know how long you’ve got.”
She credits her drive to succeed to her parents, Derek and Margaret Garrett, who were railway workers from Thorne but who studied and carved out new careers in music and education.
She added her parents death took an extreme toll on her.
Ms Garrett said: “My dad had leukaemia for four-and-a-half years, but he led a completely normal life. He began to go downhill a couple of months before the end. In the last week of his life he was in hospital and it was a good death.
“Everybody was there and he knew he was going. He saw everybody he loved and had lovely conversations with them.
“At the end I just said, ‘I love you, Dad, don’t be frightened about anything, everybody is here’. And he just went to sleep.
“But when he died we had no idea my mum was sick, too. She had kidney cancer with secondaries in her lungs.
“It wasn’t quite as easy for my mum. But we were all there and she knew we were all there, but I can’t talk about that.”
The famous singer added that despite losing her parents, she still feels them around her.
She told the Mirror: “I can hear them saying things to me. I think I carry them inside me, as my children will carry me.”
Ms Garrett said their deaths had made her think deeply about her children.
She met her husband Peter Christian when she was 35 and he was 38 and gave birth to her children around the age of 40.
Together, the couple have two children: Jeremy and Chloe, both in their twenties.
Of her children and the impact her parent’s death had, she said: “You try to make it right for them because they’re doubly terrified.
“They’ve lost their grandparents and they start to think about the mortality of their own parents.”
But despite these hardships, Lesley Garrett has continued to live her life at 100mph and now she will appear on Pointless Celebrities.
A musical special of BBC’s Pointless Celebrities featuring Tom Ogden, Ray BLK, Shaun Ryder, Rowetta, Ricky Wilson, Will Young, Naughty Boy, Lesley Garrett and a special performance by Blossoms will air on BBC One tonight at 5.50pm.
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