Amanda Holden has recounted the harrowing experience of ‘dying’ during a traumatic birth with her second daughter, Hollie, in 2012. The Britain’s Got Talent judge, 54, was left in critical condition, necessitating several blood transfusions, following a severe haemorrhage.
Though Amanda feels incredibly thankful that both she and Hollie, now aged 13, pulled through, the brush with death has left a lasting impression on her. “I had a really difficult birth with Holly, which ended up with me in a coma,” she said in a heartfelt chat with Alan Carr on BBC’s Amanda & Alan’s Spanish Job.
“I died. And I was in intensive care, and the baby was fine, and then when I came round and everything was alright, I never stopped thinking about death after that and how easy and close it is to you.
“All the time. Life is so precious, and it can disappear from you so fast that I’m just like, ‘Make every second count’. Literally.”
Tragically, these are not the only pregnancy trials Amanda endured. She also suffered a miscarriage in 2010 and experienced the devastating loss of another baby at 28 weeks in the womb a year later.
Speaking in 2022 to Heart Radio, she shared how fear gripped her as she prepared to tell her eldest daughter Lexi, now 19, describing how the traumatic period led her into a ‘surreal out-of-body experience’.
“We lost our baby Theo at 28 weeks, and they very sensitively moved me into another room so I could deliver him without having to hear the lovely babies screaming on a normal ward,” she said.
“Often that’s not thought about, it’s little things like that.” She added: “I just remember hearing this woman just screaming and screaming and then it was actually — it was me, I realised it was me that was screaming.”
A stillbirth is formally defined as ‘a baby born dead after 24 completed weeks of pregnancy. ‘ Before this point, such losses are classified as miscarriages. In England alone, one in every 250 pregnancies ends in a stillbirth, according to NHS statistics.
While some stillbirths are associated with issues such as placenta complications, birth defects, or maternal health, others remain unexplained. The TV star has previously opened up about her harrowing ordeal in a bid to raise awareness of stillbirths.
In February, she also marked the 14th anniversary of Theo’s death by lighting a candle in his memory. “Our beautiful boy would have been 14 today,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.