Brains behind the blonde ambition

Jennifer Ellison rolls up to our meeting in a sleek silver Bentley Continental GT convertible with an Everton blue interior, looking as pleased as Punch. She may have a reputation as a blonde and busty lads’ mag favourite but she’s clearly nobody’s fool.

Having made her name as a mouthy scouse teenager in Brookside, the now defunct Channel 4 soap, she enjoyed a brief flirtation with the pop charts, survived the foul mouth of Gordon Ramsay to win the Hell’s Kitchen reality TV show, then swapped saucy photo shoots for West End roles in Chicago and Boeing Boeing and, most recently, starred in The Cottage, a well-received British comedy horror flick.

The Bentley, her pride and joy, was a present to herself to help her get over a troubled relationship. Last summer Ellison, 24, discovered, via the kindly pages of the News of the World, that her fiancé Tony Richardson had been cheating on her. She later accused him of flying into rages and hitting her, on one occasion breaking her collarbone.

Furious and upset, she dumped him in spectacular fashion. She took back the keys of the new Audi she’d bought him and cashed it in, along with her own BMW 6-series, swapping them both for the Continental. With the roof rolled back and her foot down on a bright sunny day, she’s not only washed the man out of her hair but blown him away in the slipstream.

“I used to blame myself for a lot of what went on,” she says. “Half the time, I thought I deserved it. I thought I had pushed him too far or had been a bitch. It is madness. There is no way any man should beat a woman – and no way any woman should stay with a man who does.”

Then, as if drawing a line under that difficult period, she takes another look at her Bentley. “I’ve always loved cars,” she says, flashing her cheekiest grin. “I bought my first one when I was just 17. It was a gold MG convertible. The insurance alone was £7,000, but I loved that car and thought, ‘Why not?’ ” Sipping mineral water and wearing an off-duty tracksuit, she’s now determined to be taken seriously as an actress. It is three years since her last lads’ mag photo shoot, although she can’t stop magazines such as Zoo and Loaded recycling old pictures. And she’s proud she’s built her career very much on her own.

“I have met a lot of people who have influence from their parents,” she says. “Keira Knightley’s mum is a scriptwriter; Sienna Miller’s mum is connected to the business; Angelina Jolie’s dad is an actor. I can feel satisfaction that I have done it without connections or prior knowledge of how this business works.

“I was proud of the fact that when I split from Tony I did not have to give anything back,” she adds. “It was all my hard-earned money that paid for everything. He couldn’t take away my success.”

Ellison, whose thick scouse accent is softening around the edges after so many years away from home, was born and bred in Liverpool. She started dancing at the age of three and was an aspiring ballerina, winning the junior international championship, before she auditioned for Brookside on a whim and landed the part of Emily Shadwick, aged just 14.

She was Steven Gerrard’s girlfriend when he was just starting out at Liverpool (even though she is a lifelong Everton fan) and for a while looked destined to become just another washed-up Wag with a sideline in glamour modelling and heavy-duty partying. But people underestimated her sheer grit and staying power.

She feels sorry for those with talent, such as Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse, who appear to be wasting it.

“My heart goes out to them,” she says. “But I think, ‘Where are the people around them?’ My mum would never have let me get into that situation. You wonder about their relationships and you hope they can get themselves better. Celebrity messes up a lot of people.”

Ellison’s family has been wrapped around her like a security blanket. Jane, her mother, Peter, her stepfather, Jemma, her sister, and Maureen, her grandmother, are in constant contact. “I speak on the phone to my mum about 12 times a day and my gran says a prayer for me every night,” she says.

“Family support is the key. You can have a party every single night and you’re surrounded by people who are paid to do a job for you. They are going to tell you how great you are and what you want to hear. It is not necessarily the truth.

“My mother would say, ‘You are drinking too much – pack it in.’ It would not even get to the stage of the drugs.”

She now lives in a smart area of Cheshire, not far from many of the local footballers, where her Bentley lines up in the local Tesco car park alongside a host of BMWs, Mercs and Jags.

Does she ever wonder what it would have been like living the easy life as a wealthy Premier League trophy wife?

“I was with Steven [Gerrard] before the phrase ‘Wags’ was used,” she says. “And Steven was just a nice guy.

He is such a good player and will probably manage Liverpool football club one day. But no one knew him at the time. I went to his first game for Liverpool. We did not get much attention.

“But I do wonder whether I would have been as ambitious if I had stayed with Steven.”

So is Coleen McLoughlin, the soon-to-be Mrs Wayne Rooney, a lucky girl? “She has had quite a good time of it, hasn’t she?”

Ellison says with a smile. “She has also created her own luck.

“It’s great to see so many successful young women around, in their twenties, getting attention. I don’t think it has ever been a better time to be a woman.”

My stuff...

On my CD player Tracy Chapman and R&B power ballads

On my DVD player Romantic comedies and lots of soppy things, like Father of the Bride and Pretty Woman. But there’s also Braveheart and Schindler’s List

In my parking space A Bentley Continental GTC

I would never throw away A small, flat pillow. I’ve had it for years. I like to sleep on the same pillow every night

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