Modelling gave me panic attacks, says Strictly’s Jodie Kidd

Posted by mija on Jan 2, 2009 in News | 0 comments

Her career has certainly had its ups and downs.
Jodie Kidd hit rock bottom in 2007 when a tabloid newspaper revealed she allegedly offered to buy cocaine to sell to undercover reporters.
The scandal meant she lost a lucrative modelling contract with Marks and Spencer.
But the 30-year- old – who appeared on the last series of Strictly Come Dancing – is now determined to get back on the straight and narrow. ‘Every single day is a learning curve,’ she said. ‘There’s quite a lot of fight in me.’
Miss Kidd started working as a model at the tender age of 16 and although she earned a fortune, her extreme skinniness caused a barrage of criticism. Her life quickly became a whirl of catwalk appearances and glamorous photoshoots, but the pressures of modelling meant she started to suffer from panic attacks.
‘I got to about 21 and I wanted to stop for my own sanity,’ she said.
‘It’s easy to get swept up in the whole first-class Ritz lifestyle. And that’s not me. I hadn’t seen my best friend. I hadn’t gone to the pub. I hadn’t gone to the movies.
‘Then I started getting panic attacks and I wasn’t quite sure why I was anxious, because I was working and earning. But I just wasn’t happy. I wasn’t grounded.
‘I needed to see my family. I needed to walk around in wellies and muck out a stable. I needed to get back to Jodie. Country Jodie.’
The pressure on her was increased by the negative comments about her weight.
By her late teens, she was already more than 6ft tall, and her gangly frame led to her being compared to an ‘anorexic giraffe’. ‘When the Press first said I was too skinny, I was in New York, Paris and Japan,’ she told Red magazine.
‘I was going flat out and I actually didn’t see a lot of what was going on back home.’
However, she realised how fierce the controversy was when she watched a chat show discussing whether she was a bad influence on teenage girls.
Miss Kidd has since claimed her slenderness is a family trait, but at the time she kept quiet.
‘There was nothing I could do,’ she said. ‘I believe that if you can’t change it, there’s no point in fretting about it, because you’re just wasting energy.’
After giving up modelling, she followed her brother Jack’s example and became a polo player.
‘I went along to Jack’s games and started hitting a ball and went “Cor, this is really fun”,’ she said.
‘And by the end of the year I’d got my polo pony, and by the end of two years I was representing England in the Women’s World Championships.’ After several years out of the spotlight, Miss Kidd then secured the high-profile deal with Marks and Spencer.
However, she lost the contract in 2007 when The News of the World claimed she offered to buy cocaine for its reporters, who were posing as businessmen.
source: dailymail.co.uk