Ruth Langsford Reveals Heartbreak After Eamonn Split

A year after her split from husband Eamonn Holmes, Ruth Langsford was still wearing her platinum wedding ring. Occasionally her gang of close girlfriends would ask why, and she’d reply, reflexively, that she was still married. One night in May last year, the subject came up again. This time Ruth stopped to think. ‘I realised, “Well, I’m not really... I’m not still married. I mean I am, but only on paper.”’

‘Take your ring off now,’ her friends urged. ‘Do it with us.’ So she did. ‘I was crying my eyes out because it’s a big thing, isn’t it,’ she says today. ‘It’s one of those moments of acceptance. Wow. That’s it. I’m not married any more. I’m getting divorced.’

As she talks, Ruth, 65, starts to cry. They’re not the kind of pretty tears that can be whisked away by a manicured finger, but the proper sort that make her voice, as rich and familiar off screen as it is on camera, catch and thicken. You believe her when she says, ‘It’s been almost two years since we announced our separation, but it feels like two months to me.’

She was blindsided by the 2024 split from the man who’d been her partner for 27 years and her husband for 14. ‘In my opinion,’ she says carefully, ‘I had a very happy marriage. Of course you question yourself: did I miss something, was I not aware, was I too busy? But there’s no point playing the blame game.

‘I just didn’t think I’d find myself here, and I wasn’t strong at the start. I was broken. Broken heart. Broken dreams. We all have an image of how we think our life and future is going to be. This wasn’t mine. I was devastated. We had gone from being a couple, traversing the usual ups and downs of a marriage, to an abrupt end. It was a huge shock.

‘I had to give myself a good talking to because I was catastrophising: I’m going to be on my own, I don’t have a partner, what am I going to do? I was literally asking, “What’s going to become of me?”, like some sad, lonely woman in a Jane Austen novel. But then age and experience told me, “Ruth, you’re not going to die from this. I mean you are going to die, one day, but you’re not going to die from divorce.”’

Ruth Langsford was blindsided by the 2024 split from Eamonn Holmes – the man who’d been her partner for 27 years and her husband for 14 (PICTURE: Nicky Johnston)

Ruth says she and her husband had 'gone from being a couple, traversing the usual ups and downs of a marriage, to an abrupt end' (PICTURE: Nicky Johnston)

Eamonn and Ruth made up a golden husband-and-wife team who hosted This Morning from 2006 to 2021

That realisation brought another moment of acceptance. ‘I knew,’ she says firmly, ‘that I needed to create my own happiness.’ And so she set about doing just that, cracking on with work, mothering her son Jack, now 23, cooking, travelling and gardening. She also wrote her first ever book. Unlike some women in the public eye, Ruth has shunned all invitations to author an early-career autobiography or to put her name to a ghosted novel. She wanted to wait until she had something to say and here it is, Feeling Fabulous, part memoir, part manifesto for midlife.

This is 200 pages of how to feel your best, look your best and do your best, based on Ruth’s six decades of life, on and off the telly. Reading it feels like a long conversation between chums, were they to include a careers coach, a family therapist and a wardrobe mistress.

The Ruth who leaps from the pages is the woman with the curler in her fringe, the annoying bra that chafes and a fondness for a strong G&T and excellent cake. She speaks as a member of the ‘sandwich generation’, someone who juggled her job with raising a family and caring for parents with dementia. The book also marks the first time she has spoken about losing her big sister Julia to suicide, sharing what that tragedy taught her about grief and loss.

Eamonn’s in there too as Jack’s dad, one half of the golden husband-and-wife team who hosted This Morning from 2006 to 2021 and the man who was Ruth’s noisiest cheerleader in the fickle world of TV. When addressing the end of their relationship in print, it’s about how she coped, not how she folded.

‘I share experiences that have helped me, that say you are not the only person going through this,’ she explains. ‘Because when you are on TV, people seem to think you live in a gilded cage where nothing goes wrong.’ She doesn’t need to add that even when you are partnered with the divine Anton Du Beke on Strictly Come Dancing as she was back in 2017, and have Rylan on speed dial, things do go wrong.

Ruth has been a fixture on our screens for the last 30 years – she was fronting This Morning and Loose Women during the early noughties. Yet she never had a career plan and fell into TV by accident, after a chance meeting in a pub. Her background is not what you’d expect from her Home Counties Head Girl vibe. She had a wildly peripatetic childhood courtesy of her father’s military service, and was expelled from school at 16, getting just four O-levels, one of which was needlework.

Her first job was doing continuity for the local company serving the south west, which disappeared in the great 80s franchise shake-up. Being made redundant forced her into a life of precarious freelancing in London. The recurring themes of Feeling Fabulous – being resilient, seizing opportunities and overcoming even the most crushing case of imposter syndrome – are all lessons she learned from those early years.

Eamonn was already a name when he spotted Ruth on Countryfile, doing a piece to camera off the coast of Northern Ireland in a boat. She’s a rubbish sailor but, she shrugs, ‘Everyone has a mortgage to pay.’

Ruth has been a fixture on our screens for the last 30 years, fronting This Morning and Loose Women during the early Noughties

She never had a career plan and fell into TV by accident, after a chance meeting in a pub (pictured on Loose Women alongside Kelly Brook, Janet Street-Porter and Kelle Bryan)

Ruth was partnered with Anton Du Beke on Strictly Come Dancing back in 2017

When they subsequently met in real life he remembered the exact red shirt she’d been wearing and that was that. ‘I thought I had found my soulmate,’ she says. Their love affair was 24-carat TV gold, all the on-screen chemistry of two brilliant and compatible presenters, with the promise of a genuine domestic tiff about dishwasher stacking or whatever was on This Morning’s running order. ‘It’s authenticity isn’t it,’ she reflects.

‘We never had a full-blown argument on screen, we were too professional for that, but there is the banter that comes in a marriage and we didn’t hide much. We were not a manufactured screen pairing, all sweetness and light, best friends, we were a genuine married couple, and people related to that. We were reality. It just worked.’

I ask her if she thinks, looking back, that sharing so much on camera put any pressure on their marriage. ‘It didn’t for me,’ she says without hesitation. ‘But you’d have to ask Eamonn if he thought so.’ She points out that she has always drawn a line under her working day, dumping her bag at the door as she dashed into the kitchen to get the dinner on and help Jack with his homework. ‘Eamonn would say, “Let’s talk about this thing for tomorrow,” and I’d be like, “No, I am done”.’

Plus, she adds, she’s never been one for the glitz and glamour of her industry, preferring a night on the sofa in front of Coronation Street to pouring herself into a red carpet frock. ‘I might be Ruth off the telly,’ she says, ‘but I am definitely not showbiz. I am also Ruth in the garden centre, Ruth in the supermarket queue and Ruth at the tip.’

She loves domesticity and, despite her stellar career, had always wanted to preside over a busy household. However, since she was already an older mother, and Eamonn had three children from his first marriage, she had to stop after one baby. ‘I remember looking at Jack being cute and I said, “Should we have another one?” Eamonn just went, “Jesus, really? Four kids!” He didn’t say no, it just stopped me in my tracks. I thought, “You know what, Ruth, don’t push your luck, you’re 42, you conceived naturally, had a good pregnancy and a healthy baby. Be grateful.” But yes, in another life I saw myself with more.’

Being pragmatic and grateful instead of pining over what-ifs is another recurring theme in the book, and Ruth would be the first to say her life back then was bliss: she had a brilliant job, a happy marriage and a gorgeous son. Then came her decade of tragedy. Both of her parents were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, her father dying in 2012, her mother still alive today at the age of 94. Later, in 2019, her sister Julia took her own life after a long battle with depression.

Ruth writes movingly about this in the book – although she has never been able to talk about it on screen. ‘Look at me, how could I?’ she asks as she crumples and pulls back her sleeve to reveal the simple silver Tiffany bracelet she gave Julia as a thank you for being her bridesmaid back in 2010. She doesn’t ever take it off.

‘It’s the… the just not seeing her. When you think of that person and know you’ll never see them again and you never know why, you’re just left with this loss,’ she says through tears. She is painfully honest about what she could have done differently, which would have been to listen to Julia, instead of trying to offer solutions to her sadness. ‘I was doing it from a place of unconditional and bottomless love, but I realise now that in trying to help I was just putting pressure on her,’ she reflects. It’s a brave thing for Ruth to acknowledge to herself, and an even braver thing to share in the hope it will be instructive to someone supporting a loved one going through a mental health crisis.

In 2019, Ruth's sister Julia took her own life after a long battle with depression

Ruth with then husband Eamonn Holmes, alongside their son Jack and daughter Rebecca

Ruth was still coping with the fallout from all of this when her marriage broke down, and Eamonn hastily began a relationship with counsellor Katie Alexander, 22 years his junior. (This is something she won’t talk about today, nor will she discuss the granular detail of the split to protect Jack’s privacy. ‘That, 100 per cent, more than anything,’ she says.) But this was the point at which she accepted she needed professional help. ‘Girlfriends are there for you come what may, but I needed a trained counsellor, someone who didn’t know me, to help me see the way through all the darkness.’

She spent her first three therapy sessions on Zoom with just the top of her head on show, her face bowed over her keyboard, howling. ‘She said to me, “Ruth, this is grief. This is trauma and you are in shock. Let it all out.”’ It would be several more months until she accepted what her therapist then told her: ‘It might be a bumpy journey, but you’ll be all right. You have to believe that, because what else are you going to think? “Arghh, my life is going to be sh*t” No, you have to believe that there is a future for you.’

It’s been six or eight weeks since her last session; these days she only asks for one when she feels the need. ‘I don’t want to spend all my time looking back, because the danger is that you start negating your whole relationship and marriage, and I don’t think that’s right. I had many happy years with Eamonn. It just didn’t last. Now I have to look forward.’

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So she is, and she’s written a cracker of a book about making the best of the rest, about why life can be renewed in middle age, and not letting your sense of self, your style, your confidence, your joy and especially your purpose go AWOL.

‘I won’t drag on at work until I am 95,’ she says, ‘but right now I’m at the top of my game.’ She’s comfortable with ageing and won’t do fat jabs (‘though I’m so tempted’) or tweakments. ‘If I’d had Botox I’d be asking for my money back,’ she snorts. While she says she’d ‘never say never’ about any of them, she’ll stick with HRT and the Pilates machine she bought off QVC for now.

As for her private life, she’s not seeing anyone, hasn’t been on so much as a chaste coffee date yet. ‘I’m not ready for a new partner, I haven’t healed from the last one. But I haven’t been put off men, relationships or love. I haven’t even been put off marriage. I have not become a bitter old man-hater but right now I’m just living my own life and seeing where it takes me. I’m on a different path.’

I ask her to finish telling the story of her wedding ring, and being a trouper, she does. The night she took it off she put it back in its box and then stuck it in a drawer. The next day, as she washed her face, she was startled by the unfamiliar bareness of her finger.

‘I thought, “Ohhhhhh!”’ she exclaims. ‘And then… it felt right.’

• Feeling Fabulous by Ruth Langsford (Hodder & Stoughton, £22) will be published on Thursday. © Ruth Langsford 2026. To order a copy for £18.70 (offer valid to 07/03/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.