Good golly Miss Holly
Her figure has come under the harsh glare of the media spotlight, but with a billionaire boyfriend and the Strictly gig, it’s Holly Valance who’s having the last laugh
Holly Valance rolls her almond-shaped eyes and smiles a little tightly.
"I can't win," she says, simply. "You lose weight and you're too thin, you put on weight and you're not sample size. I just find it all soooo boring."Just a few months ago, 28-year-old Holly became the latest female celebrity to have her body held up to scrutiny by spiteful commentators.
Pictured at Royal Ascot in a fitted black shift dress (looking, FYI, slim, healthy and utterly normal), she later found online articles dedicated solely to her "fuller figure" and the whys and wherefores of her apparent weight gain.
They left Holly rather baffled.
Holly's so-called curves came in for criticism at Royal Ascot"Must have been a slow news day the day that story made the headlines," she says, her words dripping with sarcasm. "Surely there are better things to be worrying about than whether or not some actress has put on weight.
"If you're an intelligent person and in control of your own life, that's all you need to worry about. You shouldn't be worrying so much about other people."
OK, yes. Ex-Neighbours star turned Strictly Come Dancing hopeful Holly is a bit curvier than her days as a teenage popstrel slip of a thing. Big flipping deal.
The truth is she's never been more than a size 10 and, from where we're sitting, her slinky 5ft 8in frame looks perfectly in proportion.
She adds: "As long as you're healthy and you're putting good things into your body, that's all you can do. I'm happy."
Surely the speculation, however preposterous, must have hurt?
Not according to Holly. She treats it all with a healthy dollop of indifference and speaks with such tough-talking, don't-suffer-fools confidence that it's easy to believe her when she says she really doesn't care.
"Ah, no, it doesn't bother me!" she says. "I'm like, whatever. I've been in this industry for nearly 15 years and I guess you just get to the point where you have to tell yourself: 'At least they still think I'm relevant!'"
What does concern Holly, though, is the dangerous message it may have sent out to young girls and women.
"I just find it worrying that there's an unrealistic image of how women should look and it's put out there for everyone to live up to. We're not all going to look like supermodels. We're just not! We really need to let that one go.
"Supermodels are supermodels because they're built that way and that's their job.
"At the end of a long day I like a glass of red wine, and a cold beer on a warm summer's evening always hits the spot. But it's everything in moderation."
As if to emphasise the point, she takes a chomp from a pile of thickly-sliced toast smothered in Marmite - energy required for the seven hours of Strictly dance training she's got ahead of her today.
Exercise is already a big part of Holly's life - she's a dedicated yoga fan and also works out with a personal trainer at least four times a week.
"The personal trainers at my gym are responsible for some pretty hot bods," she says. "David Gandy, Elle Macpherson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. It's a good crowd at that gym!"
I've been dancing my cha-cha off!
Er, yeah!
"Not bad, eh? It's a personal training gym so it's very quiet and low key. They help you with everything - working out, rest, eating right. It's a lifestyle thing."
As one of the favourites to win Strictly this year (not to mention the fact that she's been partnered with Artem Chigvintsev, 29, last year's champ and Mr Kara Tointon), Holly is determined to give the competition some serious welly.
"I've been dancing my cha-cha off!" she laughs. "Artem really pushes me, which is exactly what I want in a partner. My sarcastic humour often goes over his head, but we're learning each other's funny ways.
"I hadn't seen a lot of Strictly, but I knew how powerful and positive it was. I loved the idea of being out of my comfort zone, so when my agent said the show wanted me, oh my God, I knew it was big business."
The show will undoubtedly relaunch Holly as a household name. It's been nearly 10 years since she was at the peak of her game, topping the charts in both the UK and Australia with her 2002 debut single Kiss Kiss - complete with that super-raunchy naked vid. She quit her role as Flick Scully on Neighbours and moved halfway across the world at the age of just 19.
But despite a couple of further Top-10 singles that year, the early promise proved short-lived. Holly sacked her manager Scott Michaelson (AKA Brad Willis from Neighbours, fact fans), a disastrous move that lead to an expensive court case, which proved very costly for Holly.
Her second album flopped and Holly, fed up and feeling the fickle finger of fame, decided to give up the pop dream and return to Oz.
"The music industry is so full-on and I didn't want to give it 150 per cent any more. I didn't have my mates here, I was living out of a bag as I travelled around Europe and it could be really lonely. I was pretty exhausted after working my arse off and my passion just went."
A regular girl
She took some time out before deciding to try her luck in LA, encouraged by her ever-supportive mother Rachel. The anonymity of life in the States had immediate appeal.She says: "For the first time in years I wasn't recognised when I went out. So I got to have a bit of my childhood back and to enjoy being a regular girl. Looking back, I can see how important that was to me."
Holly got herself an agent and went on to win acting roles in Prison Break, Entourage and CSI: Miami. There were mixed fortunes movie-wise: she starred opposite Liam Neeson in thriller Taken (good!) but also played a part in Paris Hilton's straight-to-video chick-flick National Lampoon's Pledge This (bad!), which, quite frankly, was never going to earn anyone involved an Oscar nomination.
Holly wears: dress, Miss Selfridge; rings, H&MStill, it's a far superior CV than most manage to rack up in Hollywood.
"It wasn't good enough for me, though," says Holly. "I expected more of myself. But it's a big, hard, fast, cut-throat place. I had girlfriends who'd been there for five years and still hadn't got an agent. Maybe I'm too hard on myself."
As Holly started to fall out of love with LA, she was renewing her affections for London, with regular working trips back to the UK.
"I love the buzz of a big city, the chaos. I like the smell of carbon monoxide! I love the culture and the fashion," she explains.
And, of course, then there was Nick.
"He was a big reason to come back," admits Holly, smiling at the mention of her boyfriend's name.
The pair met in London at a dinner party in 2009 and both of them, she says, fell in love almost immediately.
So far, so fairy tale, but then there was a moment after a few weeks when it suddenly dawned on her that the guy she'd been seeing wasn't exactly Mr Average.
"I was just chatting to one of my girlfriends about him and she started picking up bits and pieces from what I was saying and putting two and two together. Eventually she said: 'Um, you do know he's kind of a big deal?'"
Yep. He kind of is. For the last two years, Holly has been dating 38-year-old property magnate Nick Candy, one of London's premier businessmen and an established mover and shaker in the capital. Oh, and a self-made billionaire to boot.
"Up until then, I had absolutely no idea who he was," she says. "All I'd known was this lovely, warm, kind-hearted, damned attractive man who made me giggle my butt off when we met at a dinner party."
After a few months of conducting a long-distance love affair between London and LA, they realised they "couldn't live without each other", says Holly.
Holly with her boyfriend, property magnate Nick CandyShe moved to the UK and the two of them now live together at One Hyde Park - the luxury development in Knightsbridge that Nick and his brother Christian masterminded to become the most expensive residential property in the world.
An inconceivably opulent complex, the penthouses sell for up to £140million and residents are treated to 24-hour room service from the neighbouring Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The annual service charges alone are around £100,000 per property.
It's an awfully, awfully long way from Madge, Harold and Ramsay Street.
"It's so beautiful inside," says Holly. "It's a work of art and I can't believe Nick built it. I walk down the street and see it there and think: 'wowzer!' It's a really amazing, tangible thing to have achieved and I'm so proud of him.
"I'll be able to show our grandchildren one day and say: 'Grandpa built that.'"
We take it from that comment that marriage is on the cards, then.
"Oh yeah! Absolutely. It's a done deal. That's me, I'm finished," she sighs. "Nick's very traditional and I'm getting to be more that way in my old age. But we'll just have to see, I guess."
Not that he's asked her. Yet.
"There is that, yes!"
Role play
Any initial awkwardness about money around Nick is long gone - Holly has learned to accept that going Dutch simply isn't necessary when your boyfriend is a Candy brother. Besides, she says, women get too hung up on believing they're asserting independence by insisting on splitting the bill. Her advice? Just let the bloke pay."As I've got older, I've tried not to be as staunch about paying my own way," she says. "I think it's really important for men and women to have roles. I like being responsible for making the dinner. I like being able to say: 'Darling, can I get you a glass of wine,' when he comes home in the evening.
Holly wears: dress, American Apparel; cuff, rings, all Merle O'Grady"And men like to be able to buy their partner a meal in a restaurant without her wanting to pay half. Sometimes it's good just to let go and stop with the fr***ing feminist thing all the time."
Quite. There are no airs and graces with Holly. She might be moving in the same circles as some of Britain's richest and most powerful people these days, but she's still got that Aussie earthiness in abundance.
And while she looks like a lady (even dressed down in a grey T-shirt and half-dried hair, her striking features - thanks to her English/Serbian heritage - are exquisite), it's with all the sexiness and all the knowing that made her a lads' mag favourite.
"It's funny that people comment on my eyes because they were what I got teased about at school," she says.
"Rosie Huntington-Whiteley used to get picked on for those killer lips. It's weird the way things turn out."
Family values
Given the tangled web her parents, Rachel and Ryko, wove, it's curious that Holly is such a big believer in getting hitched. Six marriages between them mean that Holly has half-brothers and sisters coming out of her ears."I have to draw it for people," she says of the complicated family ties. "Mum and dad split up when I was quite young, but they have always put their children first. When I was little I'd think: 'Why do they keep getting remarried?'
I'm not really a private jet fan. It's all just stuff
"But now I can see that it's a really nice thing you can do with the person you love."
And life at chez Candy is nothing out of the ordinary, she says. "We don't have staff at home. In fact, last night we cleaned the kitchen together. We're really very normal."
If normal is living in a building with bomb-proof windows and swanning around the world on a private jet.
"Actually, I'm not really a PJ fan," she says, breezily. "We still fly Easyjet and British Airways. We have a nice life, but it could all disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. It's all just stuff.
"Yeah, it's special to be able to fly my mum and my younger sister Coco, 24, out here for a few weeks. But if everything went tomorrow and I was crushed by the loss, then I'd have been there for the wrong reasons anyway.
"I see how hard Nick works. He's ambitious and extremely smart and a pleasure to be with. He has a gorgeous family and he's very balanced because of that.
Holly as Flick Scully, with Harold Bishop in Neighbours"Oh yeah, he spoils me! The other day Nick delivered the most beautiful flowers and a love letter to me, which I've saved with everything else. I keep everything. Movie stubs from every date, little notes he's written me. It's all stored away. I'm really quite sentimental."
Bless her. It's a level of soppiness at odds with level-headed Holly's usual bluntness and pragmatism, but it's clear she's potty about her boy.
And Nick has cleared his busy schedule to make sure that he's in the Strictly studio every weekend cheering Holly on.
"I've said to him: 'Baby, you don't have to come to every show!' But he's adamant he'll be there.
"Bloody hell, 10 million people, though. I just hope I don't make a fool of myself and fall over."
But she won't. Not this time.
