TV star Davina McCall has married her partner three months after he popped the question. The news is all the more special given Davina’s serious recent health concerns
Davina McCall has had a magical end to a difficult year. The 58-year-old presenter has married her partner Michael Douglas in a romantic low key ceremony.
Michael, a celebrity hairdresser, proposed during a romantic trip to Ibiza just three months ago, and the happy couple exchanged vows during an intimate ceremony on Friday in front of family and close friends. It was reportedly followed by a larger service attended by more people the next day.
The news is all the more joyful given Davina’s incredibly difficult health journey recently. In November, she revealed she had undergone surgery after being diagnosed with breast cancer, announcing the news in an emotional video posted on Instagram.
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The 58-year-old admitted she felt “very angry” when she found out, but said she felt in a “much more positive place” following the lumpectomy in October.
She said: “I just wanted to tell you I have had breast cancer, I found a lump a few weeks ago and it came and went. But then when I was filming the Masked Singer the show Lorraine, put signs on the back of their toilet doors saying ‘check your breasts’ and every time I went for a wee I did that, and it was still there. So I underwent a biopsy and it was indeed breast cancer and I had it taken out in a lumpectomy nearly three weeks weeks ago.”
The star confirmed that the disease had been caught early and it had successfully been removed in surgery. She thanked staff at the Royal Marsden hospital in London, along with her family and her “brilliant kids” – and she sent an “extra special thanks” to her partner Michael.
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That diagnosis came after Davina had surgery just last year to remove a benign brain tumour, known as a colloid cyst, which was found after she was offered a health check-up as part of her menopause advocacy work.
Confessing that she had assumed she’d ‘ace’ the scan, Davina shared: “I was offered a health scan which I thought I was going to ace but it turned out I had a benign brain tumour, which is very rare, three in a million.”
Although she was thankfully found to be at no immediate risk, Davina revealed that doctors had feared the tumour could grow and cause complications, and so made the decision to operate. Clarifying that the tumour is ‘very rare’, Davina also asked followers to pray for her, continuing: “I slightly put my head in the sand for a while, I saw a few neurosurgeons, had quite a lot of opinions and realised I needed to take it out.
“It’s quite big, it’s 14mm wide and it needs to come out because if it grows it would be bad. I’m having it removed. Say a prayer for me. I’m in good spirits.”
Davina shared that she would need to stay in hospital for nine days before being allowed to return home to continue her recovery. As Davina continued her recuperation period, her boyfriend Michael – who has been with the star since 2019 – took over her social media channels, where he reassured fans that although the popular presenter was in ‘great shape’ she would remain ‘off grid’ for now.
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In recent years, Davina has been focused on maintaining a active, health conscious lifestyle – which she adopted in her 30s after welcoming her children. However, her teenage years and 20s were marred by a dark drug addiction, which began at the age of just 14 when she did cocaine with her sister.
A year later, she did cocaine again, this time with her French mother Florence, a woman Davina recalls as being a ‘chaotic’ and ‘party central’ alcoholic in a 2023 interview with The Times. During a 2023 episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast, Davina, who would take cannabis with Florence when she was just 12, told host Steven Bartlett that she’d also used heroin by her 16th birthday.
A turning point came when Davina was 24, when her friend Sarah issued a stern ultimatum on the way to a concert. Davina told podcast listeners: “My best friend said she was going to take me to Santana…she got me into her car. And I got in the car and she shut the doors and she said, ‘I’m actually not going to take you to Santana. I need to tell you some things’. She said, ‘I know that you’ve been lying to me’. Davina confessed: “I had just come off the back of a 24 hour cocaine bender which is what made me realise heroin wasn’t my problem, all drugs were my problem.”
She continued: “My friend said, ‘We all know you been lying to us, all your friends, and you are the topic of conversation at every dinner party I go to.’ The shame starts piling on. I started to feel a little bit, ‘well f*** you’ to her. This is virtually my only friend I’ve got left’.”
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Despite her initial anger, which saw Davina slam the door and burst into tears, the tough love message sunk in and she started to seek help. “I was a mess. You name it, I took it. Cocaine, ecstasy and heroin,” she told The Mirror .
Tragedy nearly struck Davina after she accidentally overdosed while trying to escape her ‘dark’ reality. “Drugs took me to a very, very, very dark place and, one night, I overdosed,” she admitted. “It was very frightening as it was a very gradual overdose. I’d had a cocktail of drugs, because I didn’t want to feel normal. I was constantly trying to escape myself – I was like a piece of fruit rotting from the inside.”
She went on to reflect: “When you hate yourself so much, you think you are worthless. Someone would smile at me and I wouldn’t understand why as I wasn’t worth anything. I had to try and love myself but I didn’t even like myself, so it was a big leap.”
Since she was ‘high-functioning’, right up until her argument with Sarah, Davina had believed she was getting away with her drug use. She told This Morning in 2016: “I always wore make-up, I had a job, I didn’t steal. I wasn’t like your average street junkie,”
“Everyone is different, but for me, it was when my friend said, ‘Everyone is talking about you and what a mess you are,’ that changed things. I thought I was fully functioning. But I wasn’t. My cover was blown.”
Davina finally got clean at the age of 25 with the help of her then boyfriend and music legend Eric Clapton, who supported her as she attended meetings at Narcotics Anonymous (NA). She went on to land a life-changing presenting gig with MTV in 1992 and the rest, as they say, is history. Davina asserted: “And because I got clean I got the job I’d dreamed of and that changed my life forever.”
