Coleen Nolan has just finished recording an episode of Loose Women. It’s a glorious day in London, so she has opted to sit outside the studio and soak up the sun while we chat.
Having first become famous as a member of The Nolans, the Irish sibling group who jived with Frank Sinatra and were popular in regions as far flung as Japan, for the past two decades she has found a second career as a regular panellist on the popular ITV daytime chatshow.
It’s a role she has embraced with aplomb, even if, as the self-described “shy” member of The Nolans, a career transition to TV presenter wasn’t one she or her older siblings anticipated. “I was the one that didn’t speak, and it used to drive them mad when we did interviews,” she says. “Being the baby of the family I was used to letting the older ones do all the talking. So they were probably the most shocked when I ended up on a chatshow.”
She first contributed to Loose Women in the late 1990s, after a period spent away from show business, when she was at home raising her young children. “I went on as a guest in 1999, would you believe?” she says. She never imagined she would be working again in the public eye. And music is back in her life again, too.
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She’s hoping to tour again next year with familiar songs, including those by The Nolans. “I would love to perform in Ireland, because it’s my history and also because [Irish audiences] are the best audiences in the world.”
She is also an author and memoirist, and for now her focus is on her latest book, A Hand to Hold, which reflects on grief and offers personal reflections and supportive advice. She’s in remarkably cheery form for someone who’s chatting about death. In fact, her goal is to get everyone chatting about death, she says.
“It doesn’t have to be hard and it doesn’t have to be morbid. It’s okay to laugh at things and, sometimes, the things that are easier to laugh at are things like death and funerals, because it’s shocking, so you laugh out of shock, half the time. Or you laugh because if you don’t, you’ll never stop crying.”
Nolan has experienced her fair share of grief. Her sister, Bernie Nolan died in 2013 when she was just 52 years old, having battled with breast cancer.
It hit Coleen hard. “It just felt like a massive hole in the family. Bernie was the life and soul. She loved what she did. She loved singing, she lived for it. She was the one that made sure we all got together and if there was no reason, she’d find one. Anything for a party. Anything for us to be together.”
After Bernie’s death, she says, “there were days I’d get up and I’d be fine. I’d go to the supermarket and ask, ‘What do you want for dinner?’ And I could see them [the kids] sometimes looking at me like, ‘Is she just holding this all in?’”
“I do hold a lot in, because I’m always scared. I cried about my mum, and I cried about Bernie and anyone I’ve lost. But any time I’ve cried, I’ve had to stop myself crying. Because I have this thing in my head: if I don’t stop myself crying, I won’t stop crying.” Nolan recalls something Bernie said to her before her death, which helped to get her through in the aftermath. “She said: ‘I’m going to let you have two weeks of crying, because I deserve it, and I want you to cry a lot. And then you need to get your shit together and get back out there.’
“That’s what got me out of bed,” says Nolan. “I’d be lying there thinking, I don’t want to get up and I don’t want to go to work. And I don’t want to do this: what’s the point? And then her words would instantly come to mind. And even in death she was so forceful, because I could literally hear it in my head: ‘Coleen, get out of bed. Get back to work. Shut up, there’s nothing you can do’, and she got me through it. Just by saying those words.”
Grief is still a taboo subject, Nolan believes. Often people don’t know how to interact with those who have been bereaved, so they avoid them. She recalls her sister Linda explaining how friends would cross the street to avoid her, after Linda’s husband of 26 years died. It’s not coming from a bad place, says Nolan. It’s more to do with a discomfort around knowing what to say, or perhaps a fear of causing even more hurt.
“We talk about everything, especially nowadays. We have great topics on mental health and on menopause, but there’s still not many people talking about grief.” Nolan has felt uncomfortable in the past herself, not knowing what to say to people who are grieving or how to comfort them. Now she realises that just a simple acknowledgment is what’s important. A line such as “I’m so sorry for your loss” is all that’s necessary and is always better than saying nothing.
In 2022 Nolan launched a grief-related podcast, interviewing celebrity guests including Debbie McGee and Eamonn Holmes about their experience of loss and coping with grief and sometimes guilt or other negative emotions. Initially when Nolan was asked to do the podcast, she thought it sounded depressing, but she gradually discovered how cathartic the experience of talking about grief among friends was. “We laughed a lot in those podcasts,” she says. “Especially with the funeral situation: talking about what food they wanted and what songs they wanted. It was good to know that people had felt the same as I did, when I lost all the people that I had lost in the past.”
Talking about death is important, says Nolan, not only because it helps the healing process, but because it allows people who are dying to communicate their wishes properly. Their family might have opted for a religious funeral for Bernie had she not clearly laid out that she didn’t want it. “It was the one thing she was adamant about. She didn’t want God mentioned or angels or anything like that.” In the end the family held Bernie’s funeral service at the Grand Theatre in Blackpool. “It was absolutely just exactly as she would have wanted. And that gives you comfort.”
In the book, Nolan deals with how hard it is when a death comes unexpectedly. One grief that shook her to the core was her sister-in-law Linzie’s death in 1991 following a viral infection, aged just 26. It still evokes an anger in her now, she says, and you can hear the shift in tone as she recalls the loss. “On the Monday she was choreographing our show. Tuesday my brother said she’s not feeling well. Saturday she died. We were the same age – we were a week apart. She was so healthy, a fantastic dancer. She did aerobics. She’d just got a new job. They’d just moved into their new house.
“My mum, I knew it was going to happen and she was a good age. Bernie was horrendous because she was still young, but when the time was coming we knew it was going to come. But when you’re chatting to someone on Monday and they’re dead by Saturday and they’re 26 years old, it’s shocking.”
Nolan speaks easily and with acceptance about grief, but she’s the first to admit she doesn’t have all the answers. She comes from a religious Irish family, but doesn’t consider herself a practising Catholic. “I am spiritual, but is there a God? I don’t think so. That’s a terrible thing to say in an Irish newspaper,” she says, jokingly. She thinks she “was religious” at one stage but not in the way her mother was. “I wouldn’t say I was practising, but I did believe, because I was brought up to believe. But things have happened in my life, and especially in my mum’s case [her mother had Alzheimer’s disease] where I just thought, I can’t. I just don’t. But I was always frightened of saying I don’t. I used to think, ‘If I say I don’t, and then there is, am I going to hell?’ It would be almost blasphemous for me to have a Catholic funeral.”
She envies people who have a faith, and the peace and support they get from that faith. “When my dad died, my mum got comfort in believing he’d gone to a better place. He was out of pain and he was in a good place and she was going to see him again. And I envied her that. But I couldn’t believe it.”
It’s not that you get over someone. You have to learn to live with it
As someone who speaks so freely about grief, is Nolan afraid of dying herself? “I’m scared of how I’ll die. I know I’m going to die but realistically I want to be 99 and ready to go.”
She’s hoping she’ll find a solace and readiness in old age. “I’ve met so many old people, mid-80s and above, and they give me a calmness about it [death]. I would say eight out of 10 of them go, ‘I’m ready to go now. I want to go now. I’ve done everything I need to do. Or they’ve lost their husbands of 50 years. And I think: Oh I wonder when you get to an age is that what people think? ‘I’m ready go now.’ And that’s quite comforting.”
“Bernie wasn’t ready to go,” she adds. “My sister-in-law wasn’t ready to go.”
That for Nolan was part of what made the loss so difficult. “Sometimes when you’re deep in your grief, it’s hard to understand that life has to go on. I used to get angry at people passing me that were having a laugh. I’d think, My sister has just died and you’re all carrying on like nothing’s happened. But that’s the beauty of life: it carries on. You can stay in your grief until you die, or you can think about that person, carry them in your heart.
“It’s not that you get over someone. You have to learn to live with it.”
A Hand to Hold: All I’ve Learned About Grief, by Coleen Nolan and with Julie Shaw, is published by HarperCollins
