Trinny Woodall: There was nothing I could have done about ex-husband’s suicide

What Not To Wear star Trinny Woodall has said there was “nothing I could have done” about her ex-husband Johnny Elichaoff’s suicide.

On Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place podcast, the 61-year-old reflected on the former drummer and businessman’s death in 2014, and praised the work of charities looking into mental health and suicide.

Asked about her regrets by Cotton, Woodall said: “I think going back to earlier, it’s that would’ve, should’ve, could’ve – so do I regret that I didn’t do more for my ex-husband to stop him killing himself? No, because it was nothing I could have done.

“So to ponder on the regret of somebody who kills himself, it can take you into the darkest hole, but you can also know when somebody who is in that situation switches off, and that is their path and nobody can get in.

“I had to learn.”

Woodall said there are “fabulous charities” working in the area of mental health and suicide – which she said is the biggest cause of death in men under 50.

She went on to speak about how she guided daughter Lyla, who was 11 at the time, through Elichaoff’s death.

She explained: “When I heard about Lyla’s dad, Lyla was at school and my first challenge was how can I even tell her, how can I say the words to tell her.

“My sister was a friend of a woman called Julia Samuel, who wrote an amazing book, Grief Works, and she’s fantastic.

“Julia came around to our house and I just said, ‘I need some words’, and so she said, ‘you’re going to tell her he had a heart attack in his head’.

”We told her (Lyla) and she screamed really loudly and it was like an animal scream, and then 20 minutes later she’s downstairs getting a snack, so children’s absorption of what has happened is that there’s that gut, she really loved her dad.

“This thing is just, she can’t quite understand it, but she knows that he’s not coming back in some daily way and then we had a cremation so then there’s a real awareness.

“There’s a lot of people saying, ‘I’m so sorry about your dad, Lyla’, so she’s manic a little, she was running around with her friends and then there was a memorial only 10 days after that, and there were 1,200 people in the church.

“Lyla got up and read If, but she didn’t read it, she said it with nothing and didn’t cry and it wasn’t that she was being strong.”

The beauty entrepreneur was also asked if she regrets taking drugs for a decade.

She added: “I actually don’t, because it gave me such a depth of having to deal with life at an early age, some testing things that it rounded me up more as a person.

“When I got into my 30s, I had a lot of experience to draw on to be resilient, so thereby I don’t regret that it happened and I should draw upon it.”

Best known for hosting BBC fashion show What Not To Wear with Susannah Constantine, Woodall is also the founder of cosmetics brand Trinny London.

The full interview can be heard on the Happy Place podcast available on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify.

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