THE West End musical star Ruthie Henshall reveals today how her punishing theatre schedule meant curtains for her royal romance.

Henshall speaks about her love for her former boyfriend Prince Edward on today’s edition of Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. She had an on-off relationship with the prince for five years in the early 1990s. They met while he was working for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Company on the musical Cats, in which she was starring.

She tells how she enjoyed family meals with the Queen and was smuggled into Buck-ingham Palace in the back of a car. However, the star of Miss Saigon and Les Misérables also admits the relationship with Edward broke down because of pressures on her career.

She said: “I went there [Buck-ingham Palace] a lot. I used to say I am going to my boyfriend’s. No one knew who he was. It was exciting but I genuinely fell in love with him.

“I was getting smuggled there in my own car. It didn’t make me nervous who he was.”

But the Olivier Award winner confessed: “I think I had hoped that we could carry on in our relationship but really and truthfully I was very aware I wouldn’t be able to do what I do for a living if I had stayed with him.

“I would be in the theatre, eight shows a week, and they would have to check out the theatre every night, check everyone’s bags and it would just be impossible. There was nothing, at that stage, that was more important than what I did.”

Henshall, 41, earlier said that the royal family made her feel welcome but that the relationship had to end because “I don’t think a chorus girl would have been his family’s first choice for a wife.”

She was also a guest at Prince Edward’s wedding to Sophie Rhys-Jones in 1999 and married fellow musical star Tim Howar in 2004. They live in East Anglia with daughters Lily, 5, and Dolly, 3.

Recounting a life worthy of the plot of any gritty West End musical, Henshall also talks about battling the demons of childhood sexual abuse – which she suffered at the hands of a family friend – as she turned to drink and even thought about committing suicide.

“I really hit the wall and that was when I had to deal with the sexual abuse,” she said. “I had to deal with what it had done to me because I was very, very unhappy.”

She also had to cope with the death of her sister, Noel, 49, who died of an overdose of pain-killers last August.

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