Humiliated Kym Marsh compares weight feedback to tragic Karen Carpenter
Kym Marsh recalls being mocked over her weight in Hear’Say and says it was not only mean but irresponsible as she could have followed tragic Karen Carpenter
Kym Marsh says things could have a gone very wrong for her in early stages of career(Image: Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/Getty I)
Corrie favourite Kym Marsh believes she could have gone the way of Karen Carpenter after being ridiculed over her weight at the start of her career.
Marsh found fame in Hear’Say featuring Danny Foster, Myleene Klass, Suzanne Shaw, and Noel Sullivan. They were created on the ITV reality television show Popstars which featured producer Nigel Lythgoe famously humiliating the young star by saying she had “put weight on over Christmas ” adding “Christmas may be gone but I see the goose is still fat…you need to lose weight”
The singer turned actress reckons ridiculing someone’s appearance was not only mean but irresponsible as things could have turned out much worse.
“It’s dangerous….I could have gone down the route and tried to do something,” she said. “I remember one of my absolute idols of all time is Karen Carpenter.
“I thought Karen Carpenter had one of the most beautiful singing voices ever. And she was called ‘Richard Carpenter and his chubby sister Karen’. She became anorexic and died. But it was because of that comment that had been made in the media that forced her to kind of look at herself in that way.”
It’s 25 years since the incident happened and Marsh has mixed emotions about the experience. She told Nicky Byrne’s HQ podcast: “We were the guinea pigs.
“I think we live in a different world thankfully. Back then…appearance was very important and they could say those things to you openly if they wanted to.
“For a young girl – I was 24, 25 – being told that I was fat, which I absolutely wasn’t… I didn’t aesthetically look the way that they wanted us to look, which was insane.”
Marsh began her showbiz dream very young. She recalled: “Even from being like four or five, I was at dance school and always singing with a hairbrush in the living room. It was always my dream that I used to tell my mum I was going to be a pop star.
“Then from being about 10 years old, my parents took me to this working men’s club in near where I lived, and it was one of those afternoons where anybody could, they used to call it the free and easy afternoon where people can just get up and sing with the band. It was one of those bands with the drummer
.
“I was insisting that I wanted to get up and sing, and my parents were like, ‘oh no, she can’t do that’. They’d never really properly heard me do anything. They said maybe next week, and we went the week after and I had not forgotten.I was like, I want to get up and sing on that stage. They let me get up and I sang, I sang Living Doll by Cliff Richards.”Kym then joined a little road show of kids: “I used to go and do that every week and any kind of pubs and clubs. My dad was my roadie. He was like, he did all the work, told the music for me and stuff.”
Strangely as she got older Kym lost confidence until her mum forced her to audition for Popstars: ” “It’s like, I was just so confident and so like, and as I got older, it was almost like I got a bit of imposter syndrome.
“So it was weird. The more successful I got, the more I thought, why me? It was a really strange. I’m still like that now. If I get offered a job and it’s like, I go, why have you give that to me? Which is a strange thing, I suppose, considering, you know, been in the industry now, what, 25 years.”
Marsh also hinted that Hear’Say could yet make a comeback to mark their 25th anniversary adding: “I think there’s a part of everybody that probably would love to have a little go….stranger things have happened.”
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