Samantha Womack regrets not calling her father back before his tragic suicide.
The former ‘EastEnders’ star refused to speak to her dad Noel Janus after he got drunk at her wedding and ruined her big day in 2009, but she has admitted she was riddled with guilt when she found out he’d taken his own life because she was convinced she may have been able to prevent his death if she’d supported him.
Speaking in a forthcoming episode of ‘John Bishop In Conversation With…’, which will air later this week, she said: "You can’t ever come to terms with a suicide… You don’t know if there was anything that you could have done to prevent it.
"My father left three messages on my phone after my wedding to say ‘Call me’ and I didn’t because he’d behaved badly at my wedding.
"He was drunk. The demons had already taken hold. I remember seeing him and thinking, ‘Something’s not right.’ I avoided him because I was frightened.
"Something was unhinged in the eyes. If he’d had a drink, occasionally he’d have this kind of look that wasn’t like him. He was this soft, gentle guy, but there was something… anger inside. He’d behaved badly and it was my wedding day and as much as I understood that he was in a dark place, I was hurt.
"And so for the first time I went, ‘No, I’m gonna draw a line here until he calls me sober or changes his behaviour.’ And I paid the ultimate price."
But, despite blaming herself, the 44-year-old actress now feels "at peace" with her father’s death because she knows there’s nothing she could’ve done.
She explained: "You’ll always blame yourself. But it’s been long enough now where I can look at his picture and I can smile now.
"So now I have a sense of peace with him, that’s taken me a while to get to."
Samantha lost contact with her father as a child but he reached out to her in 1996 – 20 years after they last spoke – and she invited him to her wedding in 2009.
However, the blonde beauty’s big day was hit with a dark cloud when security were forced to intervene during the reception following reports of drunken behaviour.
Samantha Womack regets not calling dad back before his suicide
