Amanda Holden: I went back to work to protect daughter

OHMYGOSSIP — Amanda Holden went back to work on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ so soon after giving birth to protect her seven-year-old daughter Lexi.

The ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ judge returned to the panel just days after coming close to death when she gave birth to daughter Hollie in January 2012, but the blonde beauty was keen to get back to normal as soon as possible so her seven-year-old daughter Lexi wouldn’t be affected by the traumatic period in her life.

She said: “I was in intensive care for four days and almost died. I got myself home and I didn’t want to think about dying any more.

“One day Lexi came home from school and was appalled I was still in my pyjamas. I knew I had to pick myself up and pull myself out of it. My body was really swollen. I looked like a rugby player and she had seen me with tubes coming out of me, it was all really hideous. We protected her from most of the horrors of it. But the normality for her was to see me go back to work and I thought, ‘I am going back’.”

After coming so close to dying, Amanda – who is married to record producer Chris Hughes – decided to write her autobiography, ‘No Holding Back’, because she wanted people’s perceptions of her to be about more than her previous failed marriage to Les Dennis and her public affair with Neil Morrissey.

She added to the Daily Mirror newspaper: “I thought it was a shallow, awful part of my life, all played out publicly. Why bring out a book? Then subsequently my life changed. Loads of amazing things happened. I found Chris, I had my children, everyone knows my journey with having children has been pretty fraught. It sounds so dramatic but I suppose the fact that I nearly died and wouldn’t have been around to tell my story made me rethink it.

“I was thinking, ‘If I had died, my mum’s version of my story wouldn’t be mine, Chris’s wouldn’t, my sister wouldn’t be able to tell it.’ There is no one but me that can do it, so I did it for my children. But I really don’t want them to read it until they are about 15. There are about two swear words. I changed lots of them thinking, ‘Lexi and Hollie will see this – and Mummy never swears.’ “