We know Holly Willoughby best as a blonde bombshell, but did you know that the This Morning presenter began her career as a brunette? In resurfaced snaps from 1999, when the TV personality would have been just 18, Holly rocked some gorgeous dark tresses, and she looks so different!
The mum-of-three has been in the TV industry since she was a teenager. After a modelling career and a brief stint in college to study psychology, she presented her first show, Xchange in 2002 before going on to present Ministry of Mayhem/Holly & Stephen's Saturday Showdown in 2004.
© Mark Large/Daily Mail/ShutterstockSpeaking about her career in children’s TV to Live magazine, she previously explained: "There were times when we went straight from the hotel bar to going live on air. Everyone on children’s TV drinks until 5 am. If you mess up, no one cares… It got a bit too wild when my breast popped out of my dress. It doesn’t help when you read the script and you’ve got to drink anchovies in custard with some eight-year-old. No matter how hard you scrub in the shower, you can’t get the smell of custard pie off your skin."
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She opened up about the wardrobe malfunction in a later interview, calling it the "most embarrassing moment of [her] life". She explained: "I actually did fall out on screen which was awful. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life. As I looked down, I was swinging around, then I turned around to tuck myself in, and all the kids were behind me who were like, [gasp!]. It’s just embarrassing, not that I’m a prude or I’m shy about that sort of thing, but not when it was an accident and it goes into a paper."
© Mark Large/Daily Mail/ShutterstockHolly also spoke about being body shamed in her early career as a model in her book, Reflections. After travelling for a modelling gig, she spoke to her agent about the reaction, writing: "The comment I got back was: 'We'll put her weight down to healthy eating while travelling.' I just thought, wow.
"I could look in the mirror and see what I was seventeen and tiny... so to hear a comment like that was a complete and utter shock… I saw for myself the brutal and, in my opinion, ugly side of what I'd always thought was the most beautiful place, and I realised then that it was not for me."
© Steve FinnHolly of course went on to huge success as a presenter and began to work on This Morning from 2009 as well as Dancing on Ice, I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! and Take Off with Bradley & Holly. It has been a difficult time for her recently following her co-star Phillip Schofield’s exit from the show following the revelation that he had an affair with a younger male colleague who worked on the show.
Phillip denied that Holly had any knowledge of the relationship, and the star later admitted that she had felt "shaken, troubled, let down, worried for the wellbeing of people on all sides of what’s been going on, and full of questions".
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