Sue Cleaver is famed for being on Coronation Street, however, she recently showed her real side during a stint on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here. The actress has spent more than 22 years playing Weatherfield resident Eileen Grimshaw.
The ITV soap character made her debut in the role in May 2000, with her first scenes alongside Emmerdale star Chris Bisson, who played Vikram Desai. However, it wasn’t her first role in the ITV soap as five years before she had played a hospital nurse who was present when Daniel Osbourne was born.
But away from the cobbles, fans have recently learned more about Sue, who was born in Watford, thanks to her appearance Down Under on I'm A Celeb with the likes of Boy George, Mike Tindall, Charlene White, Matt Hancock and eventual winner, Jill Scott.
The soap star moved to Manchester as a teenager and was married to James Quinn from 1993 to 2003 and the pair share a son, 24-year-old Elliot Quinn. Sue is now, however, in a relationship with Brian Owen, who she met on the set of Corrie when he was working as a lighting technician.
And both of them headed out to Australia to meet Sue when she left the Australian jungle, with Elliot's appearance a surprise as her rarely-seen son met her on the famous bridge. Speaking on the I’m A Celeb Coming Out Show, which aired days after the final of the ITV reality show, Sue also let slip that she had a secret communication with her family whilst in the jungle.
Catching up over tea and cake, Brian said: "It was good that you did the secret sign to the grandkids." Sue then patted her chest, replication the secret signal, and asked: "Did they see it?" to which Brian replied: "Yeah yeah they saw it."
During her time in camp, Sue also opened up about her family, telling her campmates about how she was adopted. She then left them, and viewers, completely stunned when she revealed just how she really ended up meeting her birth mother.
The 59-year-old explained that when she was in her early twenties she was at drama school and the Royal Exchange in Manchester were looking for 'tiny parts' for the theatre production of Oedipus. She shared that after walking in on the first day, an actor said: "Oh my god, she’s the absolute double of my wife when I met her," before asking Sue for her date of birth.
She said he then asked where she was born: "And I went, 'Barnet.' He rung his wife and he said, 'I’ve found her'." Sue then continued: "She was 16 or 17 when she had me. I think she did what she had to do. I grew up in a very loving family. It’s uncanny and I’ve got two half sisters who are all in the business.
"It’s lovely because my mum and my birth mother, we've all met, been out for dinner, we've all kept in touch, so we’ve all had a lovely relationship ever since, so it’s a nice ending. I’m very lucky." Later in the Bush Telegraph, Sue said: "I'm usually a very private person, I just feel really really safe and supported. It just naturally these things come out, it felt good to share."
Since appearing on I'm A Celeb Sue, who has diabetes, had been showing off her weightloss. It comes after she underwent a lifestyle change a few years ago. In 2019 it was reported that she had shed three stone after overhauling her diet. The actress was thought to have dropped from a size 16 to a size 12 to 14 since cutting out gluten and following a low-sugar Mediterranean diet.
Years earlier, in 2011, it was reported that Sue had to be rushed to hospital for treatment after collapsing on the Coronation Street set due to her diabetes. A spokesperson for Coronation Street told Mail Online at the time: “Sue felt ill on set and was taken to hospital as a precaution."
Speaking on This Morning in 2019, Sue told how she had a terrifying scare with sepsis. when she began to show symptoms while on set. She told hosts Eamon Holmes and Ruth Langsford: "I didn’t really take it seriously. I suffer with IBS and I thought I was having a flare-up."
After leaving the set early, she returned the next day only for her symptoms to get worse. "And then I came back in the next morning at 7:30am and was shooting all day. It was the hottest day of the year and I was on set with a hot water bottle, shaking," she explained. "And Melanie Hill (who played Cathy Matthews) said 'Sue, look at your feet!'
"And my feet were just blue and purple and I had goosebumps on my arms... I went home at lunchtime, I got into bed. I had socks on, leggings on and thinking 'Not only have I got really bad IBS, but I’ve caught the flu now.' However, it was actually a severe kidney infection which had caused the sepsis.
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