Shirley Ballas felt 'disdainful stares' at dad's funeral after painfully honest admission

TV star Shirley Ballasgot “disdainful stares” from her estranged dad’s family at his funeral after she described him as a deadbeat.

In her gripping new memoir, Best Foot Forward, she writes: “I was waiting to feel something, to have any sort of reaction to his passing despite everything that had gone before, but none came.

“I went to his funeral where I felt certain people were looking at me… there were definite disdainful stares in my direction, probably because it was shortly after my autobiography had been released where I’d described him as a deadbeat dad.

“Part of me is sorry I ever put that line in the book as I know it looked terribly stark in print, but I’m always honest and that was my truthful experience of him as a father.”

READ MORE: Shirley Ballas breaks off toyboy engagement after fiancé's sudden disappearance on her birthday

She says her dad George, who was known as Andy and died in 2021 aged 83, left the family home when she was two and was largely absent.

He and her mother Audrey had a “volatile relationship with explosive arguments fuelled by his drinking”. She adds: “Off he went and lived his life, marrying three more times after my mother divorced him. Our relationship was often so distant that it was easier to call him Andy than Dad or Daddy.

“I still hold some anger that he didn’t step up to the plate when we needed him. I’m mad at him because of how he treated my mother.” Shirley says she had a “slight wobble” at the funeral when they brought in his coffin but it “passed as quickly as it began”.

But the bad blood seemingly continued afterwards. Shirley says: “His wife died shortly after him and my auntie Barbara, his sister, phoned me. ‘You’re entitled to something of your dad,’ she said. I replied: ‘He gave me nothing when he was alive, I’ll take nothing now he’s dead. Give it to somebody else, I don’t want it.”’

“The only thing that I asked for was a photograph of him because I would have rather liked to have one. But they wouldn’t give me one, so there you go.”

The TV star also bravely opened up for the first time about having suicidal thoughts while battling depression in her memoir.

The 64-year-old admitted that she found herself “heading down the same route” as her brother David, who tragically took his own lifein 2003, aged 44.

• Best Foot Forward by Shirley Ballas, published by BBC Books on September 11, £22.

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