Brenda Edwards has said that when her singing business dried up during lockdown, she returned to her regular day job.
After placing fourth in the second series of The X Factor in 2005, the Loose Women star has carved herself a career in the West End and is presently performing as Killer Queen in We Will Rock You at the London Coliseum.
Despite her triumph – and spell as a frequent panellist on the ITV afternoon programme – she was forced to return to her old job as an accounts payable manager when the Covid-19 outbreak hit.
Speaking on the ‘White Wine Question Time’ podcast, she told Kate Thornton: ‘I’m still Brenda from accounts! When I’m not singing and I need some money, and I haven’t got any work in.
‘I went back to accounts in lockdown. I went back because there was no work on the theatre side so you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.’
Meanwhile, the 54-year-old diva confessed that her ex-husband Patrick motivated her to audition for The X Factor.
Brenda revealed at the time that she had been striving to make it and that it was her then-husband who helped her gain her first major break.
‘I was trying but that’s the thing. I was trying, but unsuccessfully. I knew I wanted to sing, that’s the whole thing of it really. I knew I wanted to sing,’ she recalled. ‘It was my ex-husband who entered me for it in the first place. It wasn’t me!’
Her ex approached researchers with a ‘funny sense of humour,’ persuading them to let her audition.
She added: ‘He said to the researchers “Oh, my wife thinks she’s a bit of a bird. Can she get in the queue?” Yeah, he had, well, he’s still got a very funny sense of humour.
‘But yeah, “My wife’s a bit of a bird. She thinks she can sing, can she audition?” So yeah, the rest was history. But I’ve always sung as long as I can remember and I’ve always enjoyed singing.’
Source My Celebrity Life.