'If I use drugs, I will die'

Sophie with her new love, Mark Alexiou

11 April 2012

It's fitting that Sophie Anderton, once feted model turned recurring addict, elects to meet me bang next door to Jack Barclay's exclusive car showroom in Berkeley Square. Watching her wretched public decline has been painfully similar to observing a Rolls-Royce Phantom careering outofcontrol over a cliff, a glorious and expensive object of desire crashing ignominiously to earth.

Six months ago, her cocaine addiction almost killed her; a penchant to reach for the bottle nearly did the same; and a violent, tempestuous relationship with former Chelsea goalkeeper Mark Bosnich ("My ex," she constantly calls him, sticking her tongue out and shuddering) left her without a job, money and friends. "No one would touch me and you could hardly blame them," she says with a hold-your-stare honesty about her long battle against addiction. "No one thought I was going to live. Now, I know that if I use drugs or alcohol, I will die. It's as simple as that."

It's certainly been a portentous journey for this Bristol-born former delinquent (she started smoking dope at the age of 11), who got her first modelling contract aged 15.

In a few short years, she was transformed into one of the Nineties' most famous models. Career aside, this modern Eliza Doolittle also became engaged to heir-about-town Robert Hanson, leading a Lear-Jet, socialite existence which was the envy of many but which, she now says, followed a pattern of doomed relationships which had their roots in the brutal rejection by her natural father, of which more later.

The crunch came at the beginning of this year. Her 18-month affair with Bosnich, which saw the then £40,000-aweek Premiership player arrested for allegedly assaulting her, and banned by the FA for nine months after failing a drugs test, was finally over.

But such was the damage done by the tabloid headlines, Anderton had reached rock bottom. "When I was drinking and doing drugs, it was like having two separate personalities," she says. "The diseased one, which I know is part of me, and the real one. Suddenly, I was in a position where drink and drugs were affecting every aspect of my life: my relationships, my work, my ability to function as a normal person."

Things got so bad that her parents - her mother, Sue, a housewife, and her stepfather, John, a former insurance company executive and a man she sees as her real father - were finally forced to intervene.

Last Christmas, she was homeless and desperate, her frequent inebriated forays into the West End club scene gleefully reported in the tabloids. Drugs had reduced her to a size six (too small to model lingerie).

"I had no cash and huge debts because of what I'd gone through. The degree of financial damage from my drug abuse has taken me until now just to clear on paper, let alone dealing with all the other issues. "I've been saved largely because my mother's strength has been incredible. Last Christmas, when I was in such a bad way, I remember her saying to me: 'You're not allowed to die before I do.'

"And that pushed me into action. I moved into the Millennium Hotel, another expense they helped out with, and realised I had to change. They were there for me when I needed them most, when no one else could be bothered."

Anderton couldn't leave the hotel for weeks on end, but now, at 27, she looks good: her spectral, gaunt face replaced by familiar huge, dark eyes and a sculpted English jaw, like a wellgroomed racehorse. She talks in machine-gun bursts, fussing nervously with the bangles on her wrists.

By her own admission, her fight against "the disease" isn't won yet: she tells me that, only a month ago, she suffered a relapse, and is now a daily visitor to Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous. "I had the fashion shows in London, I was tired, had a lot of pressure and I bumped into some people, old friends, and it turned out difficult for me. I have good days and bad days," she says with a wan smile.

That she is able, only a month after falling off the wagon, to talk about it is credit also, she maintains, to the influence of her current boyfriend of six months, Mark Alexiou, 28. He's the owner of the West End nightclub Pangaea and they met last summer at a fashion awards ceremony when she was still in the middle of an endless merry-go-round of alcohol and drug abuse.

"I've been very blessed this year with my family and with Mark. I want people to say, 'Oh, do you mind if I have a drink?' Of course I don't, although I'd prefer it if they didn't do a line in front of me." Alexiou has given up drinking to help her.

Two weeks ago, at the riverside apartment they share in Battersea, the couple performed a bizarrely modern ritual: he watched as she tossed her mobile phone, with the numbers of all her old friends, into the Thames. "That was the final thing for me. It was the final cut from my past, people who are dangerous for me to be around. That phone should have had 'disease' written over it."

Eyebrows were certainly raised when she first started dating Alexiou, given that every night he had to work in a place where alcohol was freely available. It was even said that whenever she went to the club's toilets, he would send minders to watch over her, and that he doesn't let her out of their flat on her own.

She admits that he has been ruthlessly protective, and has had reason to be. "At the beginning of the year, when no one believed in me, he saw something that no one else saw. A glimmer of hope underneath all the crap that was going on in my head. He wasn't on a crusade to save me, but he fell in love with the Sophie he knew within our own four walls.

"He has gone through hell getting me over this but you couldn't meet a prouder man. I don't trust the disease, he doesn't trust the disease but I trust myself now not to put myself in a position where I can lapse back to the person I don't want to be any more".

Her disastrously destructive relationship with Bosnich aside, her other long-term relationship was with playboy millionaire Robert Hanson. She met him when she was only 19: he was 36 and they were engaged until the four-year relationship finally petered out, she claims. Since then, she has spoken of her other hapless relationships, including a recent one-night stand in Italy, after which the man left cash by the bed, thinking she was a prostitute.

ALTHOUGH she speaks fondly of Hanson (unlike Bosnich, whom she refuses to mention by name), she pointedly explains that Hanson almost shares a birthday with her natural father, Michael Anderton, a former bank manager from Bristol: Sophie's mother left him when she was only three years old, and she hardly saw him as she grew up, even after being run over by a drunk driver, which saw her on morphine and prescription drugs for three years.

"My father wasn't there for me. And because of my feelings of rejection, I've always had this desperate need to be loved by men and unfortunately have picked the wrong men.

"I expected my father to love me unconditionally, and I would go back and back looking for that, and I'd just get pain coming back to me from him. It's exactly what happened with my previous relationships." Through her natural father, she has a 33-year-old half brother, Caradog (whose mother was Welsh) and a sister, Lucy, 36, both of whom live in America.

UNSURPRISINGLY, she is happiest talking about the relaunch of her career: the debut of her sports range, Perfect Clothing, which will soon be on sale in most of London's smart department stores, and the flood of new modelling assignments, including her catwalk appearance for Scott Henshall at last month's London Fashion Week. She is widely expected to be a contestant on the next I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.

Anderton is also the public face of Angels Against Addiction, a charity for young women with drink and drugs problems: it was set up by socialites Tamara Beckwith and Petrina Khashoggi, and Sophie's friends Tania Bryer and Laura Bailey are also contributors to it.

As we leave her new model agency's Mayfair offices - both of us desperate for a cigarette, the only addiction she currently enjoys - she nervously delivers what is obviously her mantra: "I've tried therapy, I've tried rehab, I've tried everything and it doesn't work. Now, with AA, I've accepted what needs to be done. Now I'm happy."

You genuinely will her to succeed. But, as always, it's Sophie's choice.

Angels Against Addiction, www.aona.co.uk

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