For several years, she was one of Emmerdale’s most prominent faces in the role of feisty Chrissie White but, in a candid interview with Metro.co.uk, actress Louise Marwood has given a deep insight on how her life spiralled into addiction, which she feared – and accepted – would kill her.
Louise, 44, who was written out from the show alongside her screen family in 2018 after four storyline packed years, was quickly consumed by self destructive behaviour, including a heavy reliance on alcohol and cocaine.
Telling me that she was written off as a ‘hopeless case’ after years of addiction, suicidal thoughts and failed rehab attempts, Louise said that she wouldn’t wish what she went through on her worst enemy.
‘It’s agony because it goes against everything in your very being to want to kill yourself. But, also, if you don’t want to live anymore, you feel trapped,’ she explained.
felt like I wanted to go and it was just this feeling of agony. I think a lot of addicts have that, because what they’re doing isn’t working anymore. They know that they’re setting fire to their life for no good reason, and they’re hurting people, and letting them down.
‘There’s guilt, there’s shame, there’s remorse. There’s all these feelings, but they can’t stop. So, they’re not in control of their life. It feels like someone’s doing this with you, so you just want to check out. I know that feeling.’
After leaving Emmerdale in a very final way, with Chrissie brutally killed off in a car crash, Louise admitted that she felt ‘untethered’ from the world after previously being able to ‘hang on to life’, with things getting much worse when Covid hit.
During the pandemic, acting work became almost impossible to land and Louise found her career and mental health in freefall.
It was the loss of this control that seriously exacerbated her drug use and what she describes as her ‘complete despair.’
‘What it enabled was that my addiction then went ten-fold because of Covid, which I imagine happened to a lot of people, with their drinking and their addiction, because we were all unaccountable and in lockdown.
‘I was written off as “she’s just going to do herself in and we just can’t watch anymore”, because I relapsed over and over again. I went to four rehabs in the end, over four years.’
At the start of the conversation, a smiling, expressive and fresh looking and sounding Louise was very clearly in a good place, telling me how she is feeling great.
A year since a huge turning point in her life in which she took control of her recovery in a four-and-a-half month rehab in South Africa, Louise is now charting her experience through a darkly comic one woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe titled Rita Lynne: Life Coach, something which she has found very therapeutic.
While her alter-ego Rita is a fictional character, her struggles and consequent recovery is heavily influenced by Louise’s experiences.
Speaking with great passion and pride about the project, which sees her take on all character roles on the stage, Louise told me more.
‘Rita Lynne very much is my addict brain in female form. My experience of addiction is that there’s a lot of painted smiles, there’s a lot of agony that’s hidden, but meanwhile you’re this persona, this person that you actually need the drugs to be. But the cost of that is the person inside you that’s dying, that’s having to feed it constantly and is terrified.
‘That juxtaposition of going through life trying to be something you’re not, and that that in itself could actually nearly kill you – which it did with me – I thought, I haven’t seen that in an addict’s story before.
‘I’ve seen addiction done well in things, but it gets glamorised a lot. I’ve never seen people really talk about what it’s like to have an addict brain, that tells you things that aren’t true, because it wants you to use and drink.
‘I wanted to show what it feels like to be right in the middle of the addiction.
‘So, when we start with Rita Lynne, you’ve got someone who’s talking about it and laughing about it, and we bring the audience on the journey with her as she discovers how sad and tragic and desperate it becomes.’
Louise enthused to me that she feels invigorated being able to tell her story and reach out both to those who can relate to what she went through and those who may not have any idea what life-threatening addiction can be like – and it shows.
Writing and rehearsing it has changed her even more and hammered home who she was and who she now wants to be.
However, it was inevitably a difficult journey, through which she had to reflect on what she had lost along the way.
‘I grieved for a lot of things while I was writing it – mainly my old life and who I thought I was and all the time I spent in limbo.
‘Then I re-found myself and went on this personal transformation journey of discovering who I was – which I’m still doing, actually. Because of this show, I was able to write down exactly what I thought about addiction, and I think just getting that out was a really big thing for me.’
Louise no longer uses or drinks and sees her excitement and lack of fear around attending the Fringe – ‘one of the booziest festivals out there’ – as a massive step forward, insisting she feels safe in herself.
‘I’m in a really good place in my recovery to be able to tell my story and feel like I can carry a story of strength and hope to people and go, “Actually, you can.” There is life on the other side.
‘So, that’s kind of where I’m at, at the moment. It feels really exciting, and it feels right. It feels like this is exactly what I should be doing at the moment, which is good.’
And what would she say to the now unrecognisable Louise of several years ago?
‘Just that it’s going to be okay and you’re going to be okay, because there were moments where I really didn’t think I was. I really thought that was going to be the end of me, and I got to the point where I was really quite nonchalant about it.
‘I accepted that it wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when, and that’s when you know you’re in a really tragic place. “It’s inevitable that this is going to kill me. I’m just going to keep going until it kills me, because that’s how this ends.”
‘So, I’d want to pull her out of that despair and tell her that it’s going to be okay, and there will be a time when you’re safe in your own company.
‘And not just that, but actually, you’re going to have a fabulous life again, there is beauty after this. It is going to be wonderful as well, you just have to keep fighting.’
Louise Marwood makes her Edinburgh Fringe debut with 60-minute show Rita Lynn: Life Coach at Pleasance Zone at 7pm on all dates between July 31 and August 25, except August 13.
