Once the darling of the lads' mags, Abi Titmuss wants to be taken seriusly as an actress. So why is she pole dancing?
By Teddy Jamieson

ALMOST the last glimpse I get of Abi Titmuss is her hanging upside down from a pole, her thighs wrapped around it as tightly as the figure-hugging leotard and vaguely fetishistic high-heeled boots she is wearing are wrapped around her. She holds the pose, then swings her body around and up the pole, switching her legs and flashing her pelvis at the audience in a display that at the least you have to admire for its athleticism. A couple of hours earlier she had told me some three months of hard work had gone into this pole dancing routine. The hard work shows.

There are no paparazzi to capture her final dismount. But then they don't tend to hang about in the Guild Hall in Preston. Instead there's an explosion of applause from the mostly female audience in the half-full hall. And they are here to see Abi the actress.

Because that's what she is now. "Yeah I am. I feel like I can put actress on my passport now," she says when we sit down to talk before showtime. It's what she's always wanted to be, she says. She recalls she had just started an acting class at Westminster College, while still working as a nurse, when she first came to public notice. "I was actually in a class. Fear and Misery of the Third Reich by Brecht. During the class they her fellow students were passing cuttings round. There were pictures of me and John. And then it all started. And everything just went on hold. I stopped nursing. Everything stopped."

Or started. It's late afternoon. Out the window there's a fine view of Preston's bus station as we sit down to speak. For the last 10 weeks Titmuss has been trekking around the country playing theatres in places like Perth, Grimsby, Lowestoft and Swansea (she's in Glasgow in a couple of weeks), alongside a cast of soap actresses including Lisa Riley, in the play The Naked Truth. Imagine the television programme Loose Women taking part in a pole dancing class and you get the measure of it. It's not high-brow, Titmuss tells me cheerfully enough.

In The Naked Truth, Titmuss, who is 33, plays a pole dancing teacher. How appropriate, some might say. Some will say. She knows that. "You can jump to conclusions about me pole dancing, but actually it's the perfect role for me. I'm also a single parent and I help the other women and we all help each other. I don't necessarily mind people making assumptions. I know if they come to see the show " She tails off, her line of thought already jumping tracks. " And it's the same with assumptions about me. I know who I am. Now I do anyway."

She's been dealing with assumptions about her ever since those "pictures of me and John" first appeared back in 2003. John, of course, being John Leslie, Titmuss's then boyfriend, who was charged (and later cleared) with sexual assault. Leslie's career as a television presenter was destroyed by the charge. Titmuss's was just beginning. She got a job as an occasional roving reporter for Richard And Judy. And then, as she says, "I had various other things happen." Those various other things would include taking cocaine and a sex life splashed over the tabloids. The release of a sex tape of a threesome involving Titmuss, another woman and Leslie. The loss of her job with Richard and Judy and the start of a career as a glamour model always ready to offer the redtops and the lads' mags a juicy quote ("I really am dirty and bad. I love sex") and a juicy photo. Appearances on Hell's Kitchen and Celebrity Love Island. Celebrity boyfriends (David Walliams, former footballer Lee Sharpe). And more media flak than an MP who's being buying duckhouses on his expenses. And more and more nights lost in a drunken fug.

She describes that period now as exciting and depressing, but what she is keen to get over is that she has turned a corner. She's moved on. "I was going out too much. I'd come home drunk and start reading poetry." (Larkin and Auden if you want to know.) "There was a point where I thought, I've had a lot of fun now. I've had a lot of up and downs. I've got to get back to what I've trained for.' "I remember walking into a garage one day and there was a picture of me on the Daily Star in my bra and pants and I just stood there and for the first time saw myself as this thing. It had all got out of control by that stage. And I fell into a lot of traps. I didn't have a clue. You make a joke and they put it as the headline and it does not look funny. It looks sleazy." A joke like, "I really am dirty and bad. I love sex" perhaps.

Anyway, she says, when you're doing a glamour shoot "you're not going to talk about knitting". Probably not. She returns to the Daily Star cover. "So this day I saw this picture and I thought, This now has to change.'"

A couple of years on and even in that short exchange you can hear the jumble of ideas and emotions going on her head. She wants to move on, yet can't quite divorce herself from where she's been. In advance of our meeting I'm told she won't want to talk about Leslie, yet she's the one who brings him up. ("I stood by John and I'm proud of that.") She doesn't want to be a glamour model any more but she's the one who tells me how many copies FHM magazine sold when she was on the cover. And how later she was to become, "at that point, the only girl in its history to be put on the cover twice".

In person she's chatty, likeable, guarded, contradictory. There's a controlling tendency in her too. She's eager to see the pictures of her taken by the photographer and when she does she is quick to point out the ones she dislikes. Then, as we talk she'll say something and then pause to consider how it will look in print.

The desire for control, I suspect, might arise out of insecurity, the same insecurity that sees her latch on to those FHM cover sales or the award for her debut West End performance in an Arthur Miller play in 2006.

Perhaps insecurity is an inevitable consequence of seeing your life spun out of your grasp by the media. Whatever you might think of her, she was treated abysmally by the press. Read the cuttings and see how often the words "slapper" and "slut" appear next to her name. Perhaps it was her ease with her own sexuality and her willingness to exploit it that so offended. (She did a deal with one photographer to ensure a cut of the earnings whenever she was papped.) She would tell him where she was going or together they would organise holidays which would allow for bikini shots. But her lifestyle hardly excuses coverage that was vitriolic and abusive. It obviously stung. "Some of the female writers would say, Why is she famous?' So why don't you stop writing about me then? I didn't ask for that. There was one female writer once, I'll never forget it. She wrote this big piece on me. I've no idea why. She said, No-one will want her as their wife, mother or daughter.' And I remember thinking, Now I have to start laughing at this, because this has got so ridiculous.'"

Did it affect her? "Of course it did." And yet she never walked away from the media fuss. She still kept posing in her bra and pants.

In her book, The Secret Diaries of Abigail Titmuss, published last year, she suggests she couldn't afford to walk away. That she needed the money to pay off the debts she owed her parents, to deal with her legal bills. Today she suggests another motive too. "John's agent said to me, You should go to America, just go and drive around America for six months.' I just thought, I don't want to.' I talked to some people about it and they said you can go away but this will be the last thing ever written about you and it will all be on file for ever." And she wanted to show them - the media, the public, herself perhaps - that she wasn't the cartoon harlot she was being painted as.

You might argue that stripping off in front of the camera is not really the best strategy, but she remains sanguine about her time as a glamour model. "Men will always like looking at pictures of women. I'm sure they were drawing pictures of women in caves and I don't think there's anything wrong with that."

It was also certainly lucrative. She earned, it is said, a seven-figure sum in one 12-month period at the height of Abi-mania. "I'm just extremely grateful now that I was able to make some money for a few years, set myself up." And yet again there's a contradiction in what she says. "I was in a house that I had bought, but I was all the time thinking, What have I used to buy this? Why has this happened to me? I don't deserve it.'"

This is a theme she returns to more than once. "There's a great phrase someone once said to me that I used to use when it was all happening. I felt like shit on a pedestal'. Don't use that as the headline. Please. Don't use it as the headline. But that's how I felt. In one way people can make you feel like you're the best thing since sliced bread because you're selling all these magazines. But deep down I felt, I have no idea why this is happening and I don't feel like I deserve it.' The award for the acting, now that's different."

She says she's wanted to be an actor as long as she can remember. "It got to the point where I was trying for Rada and my mum said, Oh we'll sell the house if we have to.' That's how much behind me they were."

Titmuss grew up in Lincolnshire, an only child, and when she wasn't being a tomboy she was playing the clarinet, the flute and the piano. Her father is a music teacher and former professional musician who discouraged her choosing music as a profession. If the last few years have been disorientating it also seems obvious, if you read anything about Titmuss, that her parents' divorce when she was 16 was just as confusing for her. In the past she has talked of going a bit wild. Depending on who she was speaking to, going a bit wild meant either wearing very short dresses or going out with an older man. Today it's something she doesn't want to talk about. "It was very difficult. I think it is on any child - your parents getting divorced. But it's probably not fair on my parents to say that."

What she will say is that it had an effect on her schoolwork. "I was a straight-A student. I used to have to constantly wear these sashes. If you got 100 consecutive As you'd have to wear a bright yellow sash. It was a dark green uniform, and a bright yellow sash around my waist. It was like walking around wearing a badge saying: I'm a swot.'" That changed. She seems to have drifted into medicine with some notion of becoming a doctor. Then again, she says, she was looking through the UCAS book choosing medical schools on the basis of the extracurricular stuff they did like drama clubs. "I was going out with a brain surgeon at the time and he was telling me about all the Shakespeare he was doing at medical school."

After graduating from City University she worked as a staff nurse for five years. "Can I just say I'm very proud of the work I did as a nurse. All the girls in the dressing room the other night were saying, Oh Abi, tell us some nursing stories.' I think after I'd told them stories of saving people's lives as part of a team they were wide-eyed."

She was in charge of an acute ward at the age of 23, did her back in, got promoted - but she still wanted to be an actress. And so she went to college. And that's where the rest of us came in when she appeared beside Leslie in a black dress at his acquittal. Six years later she's back to where she intended to be. Acting. Ask her to sum up her life today in five words and her immediate response is: "I want to say grateful, grateful, grateful, grateful, grateful."

If we're to believe the press, her relationship with the actor Marc Warren ended earlier this year. But she's become a lot less visible in the media in the last two years. No more calendars. Fewer front covers. She underwent therapy. Now she meditates. She says she's a lot happier with herself. Everyone asks you about sex, Abi, I say as our conversation comes to an end. Let's talk about love. "I fall in love all the time. I am quite a loving quite an emotional person."

What's your definition of love? She thinks about this for a moment. She's not sure. She suggests "non-judgemental". It's not hard to guess why that might be. "And spiritual", she adds. Is she? "I am now. I used to look slightly with envy at people who went to church. I went to Catholic primary school and my friends used to go to confession and I was envious of what they could get from that. But I could never believe." Now she does. Does she believe in God? "Yeah I do, in some shape or form. There's something out there."

Abi Titmuss believes in God, makes her living as an actress, is good at pole dancing and hasn't totally come to terms with the last five years of her life whatever she might say. She's a little too three-dimensional to be a cartoon.

The Naked Truth opens at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow on June 11