Coronation Street Gail star Helen Worth’s heartbreak as husband’s affair left her ‘drowning’

Actress Helen Worth – aka Coronation Street’s one and only Gail Platt – will be leaving Coronation Street this Christmas Day after more than 50 years worth of drama, family strife and, of course, plenty of disastrous marriages.

And away from Weatherfield, Helen, 73, has also found herself unlucky in love on occasion, with her first husband’s affair leaving her feeling as though she was “drowning”.

Helen’s most famous character is, of course, set to wed for a seventh time this festive season, this time to former child entertainer Jesse Chadwick (John Thomson). However, with her family harbouring some serious doubts about her latest romance, it’s unlikely we’re in for a harmonious wedding reception.

For Helen, much like Gail herself, heartache is sadly no stranger. She had once believed she’d be with her ex-husband Michael Angelis for the rest of their lives, only for his shock secret affair to explode all that she’d hoped for…

In 1991, Morecambe-born Helen married her long-term love, Michael Angelis, best known as the former narrator of the classic children’s TV series Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. The couple had been smitten since the mid-70s and were all smiles on their wedding day, but sadly, their marital bliss was short-lived.

Just four years after the confetti was thrown, Michael admitted he’d had an affair, feeling he had no choice but to be honest after learning a newspaper would be running a story about his infidelity. Opening up about this dark time during a 2001 interview with the Mirror, Helen admitted: “Nothing can ever prepare you for the day your husband sits you down and tells you he is having an affair.

“My marriage was everything to me. It was the foundation on which everything else was built. I had been with Michael for nearly half of my life. I never imagined that we wouldn’t grow old together. When he told me, everything just went black. Things started to make sense. Maybe I realised right away that something like that had been bound to happen. Things hadn’t been right for some time, but – naively maybe – I didn’t think it was serious.”

She continued: “The pictures were about to be published and he knew he had to tell me fast,” she continued. “He just said he was having an affair. I went through every emotion. I was hurt. Then angry. So angry. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t happening.

“The worst thing was that I knew it was going to be in the papers the next day. To know that the rest of the world had to know about my pain was just unbearable.”

Although they initially tried to mend their broken relationship, it became apparent the damage had been done, leading to many heartfelt discussions about where exactly they’d gone wrong. Helen, now 73, said: “I can’t describe how hard it was,” she recalls. “Everything was slipping away and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I’d be up in Manchester, just trying to get on with the job and telling myself everything would be OK. But maybe I knew, deep down, that it was never going to be OK again.”

They eventually called it a day in 2001 when more photos emerged of Michael with his mistress, the Welsh model Jennifer Khalastchi, who he went on to marry. Expressing that she felt as though she was “drowning” and being “dragged down” as their relationship imploded, Helen used work as a coping mechanism. She admitted: “I was afraid to let go. I just couldn’t imagine a world that didn’t have Michael in it. But in the end, I didn’t have a choice. I had to accept it. It was either accept it, or go under, and I was never going to do that. I’m a survivor. I’d just never been put to the test until then.”