Zoe Lucker brims with missionary zeal and her pale eyes sparkle with something approaching, well, devotion. Implausible though it may seem, the actress for ever filed in our collective TV memory as Tanya Turner — the vampish, ruthless she-devil in
Footballers’ Wives — is having a spiritual moment.
She leans across the table, tanned and voluptuous, ciggie perched between perfectly manicured nails, pearl-white teeth gleaming. Then the earthy Huddersfield twang switches to reverential whisper. “When I first saw the Dalai Lama my whole body just went into this weird state. We’d just trekked the Himalayas and there was this huge sense of people waiting to see him; monks who had been there for a year. Yet it was incredibly serene. Then he walked past us, about 3ft away, and waved. It’s the first time I’ve ever been starstruck.”
Footballers’ Wives, with its relentless overdose of hedonism, greed, selfishness and spite, might conceivably have sparked a wave of materialistic revulsion in Western society and inspired millions to embrace Buddhist approaches to compassion, good deeds and denial of the self. But it didn’t. Instead, Lucker’s face helped to launch a million shopping expeditions as women stampeded to emulate the Wag-and-slag lifestyle.
Now Lucker is returning in a kinder, gentler reincarnation. She has just finished three weeks of filming in India for a TV documentary, Date with the Dalai. Lama-dating? Well, nearly. Lucker, and her friend and fellow Footballers’ Wives actress Sarah Barrands, witnesses various religious rituals in her quest for enlightenment. She meets a naked shaman in the desert, who buries them both in the sand. She also spends a day trekking in the Himalayas to meet the Dalai Lama, although she spots him only from afar. “I just wanted to show my gratitude to him for turning my life around,” she says, her lip gloss and eye shadow impressively flawless despite the Indian midday sun.
When I last spotted Lucker, now 32, on the small screen, she was playing Tanya, all perma-tan and skin-tight Prada, having sex on an aircraft. So why the karmic U-turn? “A friend approached me to do the documentary because I was interested in the subject,” she says. “And there was an element of being able to say, ‘This is me’. Tanya isn’t me.” Although there is clearly some overlap, which Lucker is happy to admit. “From the beginning, I felt a strong sense of who Tanya was,” she says. “I sympathised with her character, although she was meant to be horrific. There was a fragility to her which I identify with.”
It was Lucker’s increasing fragility that led her to seek spiritual comfort. A few years ago, at the peak of her fame playing Tanya — before that she had only bit parts in Coronation Street and Holby City — she began to feel desperately unhappy. The tabloids picked on her during an on-off affair with children’s TV presenter Tony Craig. The pressure proved too much. “I felt trapped. Suddenly I was launched into this world where everyone knew who I was. Outside her home in Stoke Newington, North London, a woman ran up to her. “She screamed in my face: ‘Are you going to get off that f**king television or am I going to have to make you?’ It was horrible. Even more anxiety began to build up.”
Around the same time, she began to have panic attacks. “It started with really bad palpitations before a take. I wasn’t sleeping and I was working 15-hour days. It had a lot to do with self-esteem, putting pressure on myself and not wanting to let anyone down. I don’t suffer from depression but I was very down. I think it’s difficult to look around at what you’ve got and think ‘I should be happy, I tick all the boxes’. ”
Thus far we have a standard modern parable of rags-to-riches-to-celeb-depression. But the next step, which we could christen Prioryisation, didn’t provide a miracle cure. She went into counselling, but while “it was therapeutic to talk and not be judged for how you feel” it was a book that turned her around. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living (Hodder & Stoughton, £8.99) by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, an American psychiatrist, changed her outlook. “It was almost immediate when I started reading it, this sense of incredible comfort and reassurance.”
Thus she joined the Buddha trail, in the footsteps of celeb luminaries such as Richard Gere. But she sincerely believes that she found great consolation from feeling for the first time that change was possible. “Half the time you think ‘I’m going to spend my entire life feeling like this’,” she says. “But you don’t, and that’s the brilliant thing I’ve learnt from reading it.
What they say in the book is that you can find happiness if you let yourself. Everything is a stage in our lives and we come through the other side.”
The self-help guide, a series of conversations contemplating happiness, came out eight years ago and was on The New York Times bestseller list for two years. The Dalai Lama’s Buddhist reflections are tempered with Cutler’s scientific background to give practical strategies for everyday problems. Lucker was so influenced by the book that she appeared on Gloria Hunniford’s Heaven and Earth,
BBC One’s Sunday-morning programme, to evangelise about it.
“My friends couldn’t believe it. Talking on a religious programme when I was best known for being this cocaine-snorting vixen,” she says.
Lucker is less surprised by such a shift in mindset. “There has always been an element of this in me.” The second of four children, she grew up in Huddersfield. Her parents were teachers and later started a business designing stained glass windows. They sent her to Sunday school and then a Methodist Youth Club, which she thoroughly enjoyed.
Despite the religion in her upbringing — she had an uncle who was a vicar — Lucker isn’t drawn to the Church and prefers to learn everything she can about Buddhism, although she doesn’t want to commit to the religion just yet. Instead she is content to enjoy Budd-lite “I’m not a practising Buddhist,” she says quickly. “I don’t chant. I don’t go to Buddhist temples. At this stage, I’m happy the way it works for me. I just try to keep a check on stuff.”
Are there any key passages in the Art of Happiness that inspired her? Lucker reflects for a moment. “The main message I took is that in order to make me happy I have to make other people happy. It’s about trust, friendship and the fundamental things in life we take for granted.”
Buddhist philosophy may have brought her comfort but it doesn’t appear to have calmed her down. She is a bundle of restless energy, animated, talking non-stop and smoking. Has she considered alternative forms of relaxation? “No, I did t’ai chi once; it was so boring,” she laughs. Along with the book she says that staying single for the past 18 months has built up her self-confidence. “I like being single. I have stopped being in those situations where you cut yourself off from doing new things.”
Instead she loves travelling. She has returned recently from a trip to Zambia with the VSO and has launched a campaign to raise £100,000 for an HIV clinic there. “It’s about taking the focus away from yourself, thinking about other things,” she says.
So is that the end of the ruthless superbitch image? Apparently not. Lucker is lined up to play the vampish arch-enemy Rani in the next series of Doctor Who. Tanya would definitely approve, although how the concepts of time-travel and “be here now” fit together is quite another question.
Date with the Dalai is on ITV2 on Tuesday, September 12 and 19, 9pm
