‘A lot of people have grown up with me’ – The profession of Bonnie Langford

She is 59 and has been our screens for six many years, so naturally Bonnie Langford turns heads in public. “Some people stop me and say, ‘I’m trying to think who you are’, and when I say ‘I’m Bonnie Langford’, they say ‘No’. I think I know my own name!”

Bonnie laughs heartily and provides, “Once I asked, ‘Well who do you think I am?’, and they said ‘Julia Roberts’! I thought, I’ll have that!”

Quite. At 5ft 9, head-turning Hollywood star Julia is an effective eight inches taller than our red-haired pocket-rocket.

Today Bonnie is carrying a sweatshirt emblazoned with the slogan ‘Don’t communicate to me’. She’s not being anti-social; it’s a memento from her 2021 stint on ITV’s The Masked Dancer. She has an image of her, as Squirrel, with sequence winner Carwash (Louis Smith) and Zip (Take That’s Howard Donald).

“I didn’t have any idea who they really were when it was taken, none of us knew until we were unmasked.

“One night, I was watching Tom Jones on Celebrity Gogglebox watching me as the squirrel not knowing it was me…it was the most wonderful, surreal moment.”

Langford’s total TV profession has a barely surreal really feel, spanning every little thing from cleaning soap to Monty Python’s Spamalot!

“A lot of people have grown up with me. I get ‘My mum really likes you’ a lot, and that’s okay, but when it’s ‘My grandma really likes you’…oh! I can generally tell how old people are by what they ask me about. The older ones ask about Just William or Bugsy Malone, the middle-aged tend to ask about musical theatre, and for younger ones it’s EastEnders” – she performed Carmel Kazemi from 2015 to 2018.

And these like me who keep in mind you on Opportunity Knocks? “You’re from the Ark,” she laughs.

Langford was six when she gained the ITV expertise present in 1970 and ten when she appeared within the 1974 Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne’s Gypsy: A Musical Fable, loosely based mostly on the memoir of Gypsy Rose Lee, the burlesque entertainer who turned striptease into an artform.

That present, starring Angela Lansbury, is the rationale Bonnie has joined the solid of Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends which opens on twenty first September at London’s Gielgud Theatre.

The stellar line-up consists of Broadway legends Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, British musical theatre stars Bradley Jaden and Gavin Lee, Australia’s Damian Humbley and extra.

“The cast and show are phenomenal,” says Bonnie, her eyes on full-sparkle. “It’s not a concert, it’s an event celebrating the life and music of Stephen Sondheim, and what makes it unique is that the cast must all have an association with Stephen Sondheim. We have a 12-piece orchestra, it’s going to sound beautiful.”

Sondheim, the genius songwriter who reinvented American musical theatre, died in 2021 leaving a wealthy legacy of basic numbers like Maria, America, Send In The Clowns and Everything’s Coming Up Roses. He both wrote or co-wrote unforgettable musicals like West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music and the aforementioned Gypsy.

Bonny was eight when she joined the London solid as Baby June; Angela Lansbury starred. “The following year we did a 14-city nationwide tour of the USA and then a season on Broadway,” she remembers.

“My mother came to America with me for almost a year, she’d never been abroad before, it was a huge challenge. She missed my father and my sisters terribly, but Angela Lansbury was wonderful; she really looked out for her – and us. She talked to the kids in the show as if we were adults.”

When the present moved to Los Angeles for a run, Lansbury paid for all of them to have a guided tour of Disneyland. “It was like a fairytale,” says Bonnie.

She was born Bonita Melody Lysette Langford in Hampton Court, Surrey, however says “only two people in the world call me Bonita now – one is Dexter Fletcher, who I was in Bugsy Malone with when I was nine, and the other is Russell T Davies”.

Bonnie performed Doctor Who’s time-travelling assistant Melanie Bush, a companion of the sixth and seventh docs (Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy) and returns as her in new sequence – run and written by Russell T.

“The new Doctor is fabulous, risky and exciting,” she enthuses.

Not everybody beloved younger Bonnie. A yr after successful Opportunity Knocks (singing on The Good Ship Lollipop), she performed Scarlett O’Hara’s daughter in a West End manufacturing of Gone With The Wind. An unimpressed Noel Coward sniped, “They should cut the second act – and that child’s throat.”

At 12, she performed speech-impediment-afflicted Violet Elizabeth Bott in ITV’s Just William, and terrorised William’s schoolboy gang by threatening to “thcweam and thcweam until I’m thick”.

The following yr, she had her personal Lena & Bonnie TV present with ill-fated Lena Zavaroni.

Suburban household life saved her grounded. She and her two older sisters, who additionally educated as dancers, grew up in humble semi in Twickenham, southwest London. Wherever Bonnie labored both her mom Babette or her late father Donald would accompany her.

She wasn’t pressured into showbiz, she says. “You can’t make a kid do something they don’t want to do, and you don’t keep doing it for 50 years if you don’t want to do it.”

Her supportive sisters now work behind the scenes. The household efficiency gene started with a great-aunt who toured with the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova earlier than founding a dance faculty which Bonnie’s mom later ran.

Like her mother and father, Bonnie values the occupation over the pursuit of fame. EastEnders dramatically raised her profile nevertheless. “I still get called Carmel a lot, especially by young people. I was Kush’s mum; Davood Ghadami was lovely in real life.”

Both her cleaning soap sons have been slaughtered. Kush was pushed underneath a tube practice, Shakil (Shaheen Jafargholi) was stabbed. “I’m lucky I’m still alive,” she laughs.

“It touched people. They’d come up and console me on the streets and then pour out their hearts to me. I felt honoured. The knife crime storyline was poignant and beautifully done.”

Bonnie had her tough real-life interval in her mid-20s. “I was working hard and going out too much. I needed to be perfect and then I allowed myself not to be perfect and the world still turned.”

There have been instances when cash dried up. But she says. “We’ve all had that. You learn quickly that ‘rich’ and ‘famous’ don’t always go together.”

In 2015, she divorced actor husband Paul Grunert after a 20-year marriage. Now she’s blissful spending time together with her daughter Bibi, 22, and strolling her three-year-old canine Poppy.

“I walked her this morning; that’s how I relax. I take my work seriously, but not myself. You’ve got to see the funny side of life.”

She’s nonetheless match, her slim physique honed by many years of dancing and dedication. “You can’t be the cherry on the cake without the cake,” she says.

Bonnie is within the second week of rehearsals for the Sondheim spectacular which one twerp has already prompt celebrates “the music of Steven Spielberg. That would be a very different show,” she laughs. “Open with Jaws, a bit of Close Encounters…”

It will run for 4 months. “After this, I might lie down in a dark room,” says Bonnie. “My head is spinning. There’s so much music and lyrics, it’s beautifully layered but quite complicated. It’ll be an event.

“Stephen Sondheim looked at the imperfections of people and our vulnerability and our craziness. We’re all a bit bonkers, and thank God for that.”

She has no game-plan for 2024. “I’ve never had a bucket list and there are lots of things I’ve done in my career that wouldn’t have been on my bucket list, but were interesting and challenging. Not what I’d planned, but what I needed at the time.”

• Bonnie stars alongside an entire array of Broadway and West End legends in Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends at London’s Gielgud Theatre from twenty first September for 16 weeks solely.