Lorraine Kelly has said she doesn’t bear a grudge towards Anthea Turner after she took her job on GMTV.
At the time Lorraine was on maternity leave after giving birth to her daughter Rosie, now 28.
A week before she was due to come back, the TV star says she was told she had been replaced.
Speaking to Elizabeth Day’s How To Fail podcast, she was asked: “Is it true - I couldn’t quite believe this when I read this- and you were sacked when you were on maternity leave?
“Yes,” Lorraine replied, before Elizabeth questioned: “Is that not illegal?”
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“No, not back then. That was 1994 and I was freelance,” Lorraine explained.
“She [Rosie] was born in June and I was going back to work in September, a couple of months later, but if you’re freelance that’s what you have to do.
“We just got the call about a week before I was due to come back – I was thinking oh I haven’t lost any of my baby weight, who cares.
“And I just got the call to say ‘Really, sorry we’ve got Anthea Turner, but do you know what thanks and that’s that.’”
Asked if she bore a ‘terrible grudge’ against Anthea, the 62-year-old TV legend said: “No, not at all.”
She continued: “She’s a nice girl, and of course it didn’t work, because her and Eamonn [Holmes] were like oil and water, and it didn’t work.”
Eamonn and Anthea Turner were thrust together to host GMTV in 1994 - but it was far from a match made in heaven.
The pairing instead triggered an 11-year feud that saw Eamonn accuse his co-star of being vain.
He also branded her 'Princess Tippy Toes' in a sensational interview before she famously quit the show 24 years ago this month amid a storm of 'hurt'.
Anthea told The Mirror: "I was gutted. What he did hurt me terribly. I'd be lying if I said it didn't.
"I never was and never wanted to be a rival to Eamonn. Maybe he didn't understand that. He is an excellent journalist and he is well respected for that. I was never any threat to him."
Anthea and Eamonn have since put the past behind them and made friends.
And it all worked out for Lorraine who was asked back to GMTV in January 1995 and given her own show, which she still hosts to this day after ITV ’s Good Morning Britain.
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