As EastEnders legend Sonia Fowler, Natalie Cassidy has been through the mill in the three decades she was an inhabitant of Albert Square. She gave birth at 15 to her daughter, Bex, embarked on a lesbian affair, and was wrongly accused of killing the wife of her murderous boyfriend, Reiss, before giving birth to his baby daughter, Julia, amid the rubble of the Queen Vic moments after the building collapsed and killed him during the 40th anniversary episode.
In her new autobiography, Happy Days, the 42-year-old charts the unexpected turn her life took when, aged 10, she was spotted at drama school and propelled to fame on the BBC soap, which she departed in April.
Here, Natalie – who shares daughter Joanie, nine, with fiancé Marc Humphreys, and is also…