Latest news with #Winkleman
Economic Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Economic Times
The "disgusting" UK royal wedding scandal that forced Lady Frederick Windsor to speak out after 16 years
Getty Images Lord Freddie Windsor And Sophie Winkleman Wedding Lady Frederick Windsor, previously known as Sophie Winkleman and a British actress best known for her work on Peep Show and Two and a Half Men, is used to being in the spotlight. But in a refreshingly honest interview with The Telegraph, Lady Frederick Windsor has let on that not all royal weddings are like fairy tales—just not when it comes to hair. Winkleman, 44, wed Lord Frederick Windsor in 2009. Lord Frederick Windsor, is the son of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. Prince Michael is a first cousin of the late Queen Elizabeth II, making Lord Frederick a second cousin to King Charles III and is currently 54th in the line of succession to the British throne But, she recounts the rush of wedding bells and future demands didn't leave much time for pre-wedding beauty preparations. 'It was such a blur because we had to move to Los Angeles the day after [the wedding], and I had to start a brand new job the day after that,' she recalled. 'So we got married on Saturday and moved everything, our whole lives, out to America the day after. And I'd been so concentrating on the work that I hadn't thought about the wedding.'The outcome? A royal hair "don't." 'Which meant that my hair was so disgusting, and Freddie still gets upset about it,' Winkleman admitted with characteristic humor. 'It was just disgusting.' Regarding her attire, Winkleman disclosed that her in-law, Princess Michael of Kent, took charge. 'She sort of took it all over, and I actually didn't mind at all. I thought, 'Great, do everything,' she said. 'I was concentrating on this acting job and saying goodbye to my darling granny, who wasn't very well, and just doing other stuff. But now I look back on it and think I should have worn a simpler dress, and I should have got my hair blow-dried by someone who'd done it before.'In spite of the hair disaster, Winkleman speaks only praise of her royal in-laws. 'Family isn't always brilliant, but this lot are very sweet. I love all of them,' she a mother of two daughters—Maud, age 11, and Isabella, age 8—Winkleman has turned her attention to contemporary parenting issues, such as the dangers of screen time. Working alongside social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and actor Hugh Grant, she's become a vocal critic of over-use of screens in schools, going so far as to make a speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London. Looking back on her own royal wedding day, Winkleman's goofy crackle reminds us that even the most star-studded affairs can have their flawlessly imperfect moments. And sometimes, a bit of "disgusting" hair is just part of the story.
Time of India
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
The "disgusting" UK royal wedding scandal that forced Lady Frederick Windsor to speak out after 16 years
Lady Frederick Windsor, previously known as Sophie Winkleman and a British actress best known for her work on Peep Show and Two and a Half Men, is used to being in the spotlight. But in a refreshingly honest interview with The Telegraph , Lady Frederick Windsor has let on that not all royal weddings are like fairy tales—just not when it comes to hair. Winkleman, 44, wed Lord Frederick Windsor in 2009. Lord Frederick Windsor, is the son of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent . Prince Michael is a first cousin of the late Queen Elizabeth II, making Lord Frederick a second cousin to King Charles III and is currently 54th in the line of succession to the British throne But, she recounts the rush of wedding bells and future demands didn't leave much time for pre-wedding beauty preparations. 'It was such a blur because we had to move to Los Angeles the day after [the wedding], and I had to start a brand new job the day after that,' she recalled. 'So we got married on Saturday and moved everything, our whole lives, out to America the day after. And I'd been so concentrating on the work that I hadn't thought about the wedding.' The outcome? A royal hair "don't." 'Which meant that my hair was so disgusting, and Freddie still gets upset about it,' Winkleman admitted with characteristic humor. 'It was just disgusting.' Live Events Regarding her attire, Winkleman disclosed that her in-law, Princess Michael of Kent, took charge. 'She sort of took it all over, and I actually didn't mind at all. I thought, 'Great, do everything,' she said. 'I was concentrating on this acting job and saying goodbye to my darling granny, who wasn't very well, and just doing other stuff. But now I look back on it and think I should have worn a simpler dress, and I should have got my hair blow-dried by someone who'd done it before.' In spite of the hair disaster, Winkleman speaks only praise of her royal in-laws. 'Family isn't always brilliant, but this lot are very sweet. I love all of them,' she shared. Now a mother of two daughters—Maud, age 11, and Isabella, age 8—Winkleman has turned her attention to contemporary parenting issues, such as the dangers of screen time. Working alongside social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and actor Hugh Grant, she's become a vocal critic of over-use of screens in schools, going so far as to make a speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London. Looking back on her own royal wedding day, Winkleman's goofy crackle reminds us that even the most star-studded affairs can have their flawlessly imperfect moments. And sometimes, a bit of "disgusting" hair is just part of the story.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Sophie Winkleman: ‘The Royal family are very sweet. I love them all'
Sophie Windsor had never been the type to post much on the class WhatsApp group. The actress, best known for her role as Big Suze in Peep Show, preferred to keep a low profile. 'I just didn't go anywhere near them,' admits the 44-year-old, who has two daughters, Maud, aged 11, and Isabella, aged 9 with her husband Lord Frederick Windsor, the son of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. 'But then I had to become that maniac mother who got everyone together before Year 7 and said, 'Can we maybe not do this?'.' What Windsor – or Winkleman, as she is known professionally – wanted was to persuade fellow parents not to automatically give their offspring a smartphone on arrival at secondary school. According to Ofcom, the online safety regulator, nine in 10 children own a mobile phone by the time they leave primary school. But having become increasingly alarmed by research revealing how harmful they are to children's health and education, Winkleman attempted to lead a parents' revolt. 'It was so anti my nature to do that. [To be] the sort of noisy, irritating goose at the school gate,' she admits. 'The screen thing I was quite fanatical about because it was so obvious during lockdown that it was such a terrible way to learn. They are completely un-put-down-able – all these devices.' It started out well, but then slowly 'everyone sort of started folding', she explains. 'Year 7's so hard and so stressful. [Maud] was already self-conscious about me being a mum who was against phones – there's nothing less cool, I mean, what a loser. So my daughter's got one now.' She clarifies that the old iPhone allows her to send 'sweet little texts' but doesn't have any apps enabled. Like any parent of Generation Z and Alpha children, Winkleman had tried to resist the lure of screens from an early age. 'I'm incredibly lazy in every other way, apart from screen use. I'm not a hands on mum; they don't do cello and they don't do Chinese, they can just do what they like.' But everything changed when 'their schools gave them iPads without telling me.' She despairs: 'So they're on screen for a lot of the day. They come home, they open up the damn thing again, and they're on screen for two hours doing homework. And it's such a physically unhealthy way to learn. It's so bad for their eyesight, it's bad for their posture, it's bad for their sleep rhythms. It's even bad for hormones and it's terrible cognitively.' Knowing what she does now, having read extensively on the subject, she admits: 'I wasn't robust enough to immediately take them off them. I regret that. I could have just said, 'No, you're not having them' and had a week of hell. I was a bit pathetic.' But now the mother of two has become a leading voice campaigning for phone-free schools – and the removal of most of the educational technology ('EdTech') from classrooms. Earlier this year, she warned of the 'digital destruction of childhood' during a hard-hitting speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London. She recently joined forces with Jonathan Haidt, the American social psychologist and author of the 2024 book The Anxious Generation – to raise awareness alongside fellow actor and father of five, Hugh Grant. Haidt, who believes smartphones should be banned for under-14s, and under-16s should be prohibited from using social media, argues screens have not just caused an 'epidemic of mental illness' in children, but 'rewired' their brains, resulting in 'attention fragmentation'. The Government has rejected calls for a law banning phones in classrooms, and Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has dismissed the demands as a 'headline-grabbing gimmick'. At a recent event organised by the campaign group Close Screens, Open Minds at Knightsbridge School in London, Grant, 64, urged parents to take on the Government: 'I don't think politicians ever do anything because it's the right thing to do, even if it's the right thing to do to protect children. They'll only do what gets them votes. They only care about their career.' Winkleman agrees. 'I'm beginning to worry that this country just doesn't care about children. I've been banging on about screen damage to children for about three years now – and now there's a spate of very intelligent articles about how screens are ruining adults' cognitive health and suddenly everyone's very interested.' Like Haidt, who argues modern parents have underprotected their children online and overprotected them in the 'real world', Winkleman is also dismayed by the lack of traditional forms of play. 'It's so healthy for a child to get really bored and start making his or her own fun. That doesn't need to involve any money. I mean, it can involve a piece of paper and a pen or, you know, if you're a baby, a wooden spoon. You don't need these jazz hands tools to be entertained.' She also advocates a return to pen and paper and for children to be encouraged to handwrite rather than type, insisting it 'implants information so much more profoundly and long-lastingly into the brain than typing does'. She adds: 'I think children's brains are completely atrophying because they're just passive vessels for all sorts of content. They're not developing their imagination anymore because they've got these machines, they can be constantly entertained and it's such a mistake. Apparently, if kids keep going on the way they are, spending seven hours a day on screens, it will amount to 22 years of their lives. That's more than a quarter of a person's life.' Sophie is the daughter of Barry Winkleman, publisher of The Times Atlas of World History, and the children's author Cindy Black. The television presenter Claudia Winkleman is her half-sister from her father's first marriage to the journalist Eve Pollard. Educated at the City of London School for Girls and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she studied English literature, she developed a passion for acting after joining the Cambridge Footlights. Considering herself 'lucky' to be brought up in leafy north London, she says: 'I was very irritatingly lucky. I have two very wonderful parents who I'm far too close to. It's actually awful how close I am to them. I wish I liked them less. I grew up in Primrose Hill before it had a Space NK, when it was still quite shabby and full of lentil shops.' She met Freddie, who is 54th in line to the throne, after sharing a taxi from a party in Soho on New Year's Eve in 2006, when he recognised her from Peep Show. He works as an executive director at JP Morgan and the couple live in south London. Their 2009 wedding at Hampton Court Palace was attended by around 400 guests, including Princess Eugenie, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, actress Jane Asher, Lady Helen Taylor and the singer Bryan Adams. 'It was such a blur because we had to move to Los Angeles the day after and I had to start a brand new job the day after that. So we got married on Saturday and moved everything, our whole lives out to America the day after. And I'd been so concentrating on the work that I hadn't thought about the wedding. 'Which meant that my hair was so disgusting and Freddy still gets upset about it. It was just disgusting. And my mother-in-law chose my dress, which was very sweet and puffy, but I looked barking.' Princess Pushy, as she was cruelly named by the tabloids, chose her dress? 'She sort of took it all over and I actually didn't mind at all. I thought, 'Great, do everything.' I was concentrating on this acting job and saying goodbye to my darling granny who wasn't very well and just doing other stuff. But now I look back on it and think I should have worn a simpler dress and I should have got my hair blow dried by someone who'd done it before.' The Royal family, she insists, were always welcoming. 'Family isn't always brilliant but this lot are very sweet. I love all of them.' Despite finding having the children 'astoundingly knackering', Winkleman has balanced an acting career with a huge amount of charity work and is patron of a number of organisations including the Children's Surgery Foundation and School-Home Support, which, she says, 'keeps children from very tough homes in school and learning.' One of the reasons she campaigns on screens is because of the adverse impact on children from disadvantaged backgrounds. 'The reason we need government intervention is that I think it's predominantly a middle class thing at the moment. It's middle class parents having the confidence to rally people around and say, 'Let's not do this.' And poorer kids are being destroyed by these things. It's not a patronising thing to say. It's true. They're on them all night long. They're going to school wrecked, not focusing, eating rubbish, being angry. I know this because of the education charity and so many teachers I've spoken to. That's why it needs to be a big, old governmental piece of legislation.' Although she says 'I don't think kids should have internet-enabled devices till they finish their GCSEs,' she realises 'it won't happen'. Instead she wants the UK to follow Sweden's lead and remove most of the EdTech from schools, except in the lessons where it's essential, such as computer science. 'They've been very brave and admitted they made a big mistake – that EdTech is a failed experiment. They got computers out of the classroom and reinvested in books, paper and pen. And the children are doing brilliantly. Surprise. Surprise.' The Safer Phones Bill and Online Safety Bill are currently going through Parliament, but Winkleman believes neither go far enough. 'Parents all over the country can get a better grasp on this. I think we have to go towards the doctors and there's a brilliant group called Health Professionals for Safer Screens and they are paediatricians, psychiatrists, optometrists, speech and language therapists. They're all at the coalface seeing what damage screen use in and out of school is doing to children. I think it needs to be a public health warning. They're saying that even 11 to 17-year-olds shouldn't have more than one to two hours of screen time per day.' Parents can mount a revolution, she argues, but ultimately 'it has to come from all the young people'. She adds: 'There was a recent report which interviewed teenagers and asked them, 'If social media and smartphones were banned for all of you, would you be OK with that?' They all said, 'Yes, please,'.' And with that, Winkleman is off to her next acting job: to record a radio play in which she's portraying a mole. She has just finished filming a BBC One drama called Wild Cherry, 'about a group of horrible, competitive, wealthy mothers and their very screwed up teenage daughters.' She laughs: 'I'm playing a complete maniac, which is really fun.' It will certainly be a departure from her clear-eyed and cool-headed quest to lead the mother of all campaigns to end the digital destruction of childhood. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Daily Mirror
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Claudia Winkleman fans floored after seeing what star looks like without fringe
A clip from 1996 has resurfaced showing a fresh-faced Claudia Winkleman, who has been presenting Strictly Come Dancing since 2010, and fans can't believe how different she looks Claudia Winkleman's fans have been left gobsmacked after a throwback clip from 1996 resurfaced, showing the star long before she became a familiar face on Strictly Come Dancing. The now 53-year-old joined the Strictly results show as a co-host with Tess Daly in 2010, and ascended to the main show in 2014 after Bruce Forsyth stepped down. Known for her iconic fringe and heavy eyeliner, Claudia's signature style has become synonymous with her TV persona. But viewers were astonished to see how different she appeared as a youthful 24-year-old in vintage BBC archive footage. The Instagram post, featuring the clip, was captioned: "Claudia Winkleman on how to improve your pulling power. OnThisDay 1996: Claudia Winkleman had some top tips and choice chat-up lines to help men and women alike, to improve their pulling power. Clip taken from Good Morning with Anne and Nick, originally broadcast 3 May 1996." In the snippet, a young Winkleman, dubbed a "chat up connoisseur", dishes out flirting advice aimed at both sexes. Fans didn't hold back on their reactions to her pre-fame look, with one commenting: "She's a beautiful lady - she doesn't need to hide behind a fringe and eyeline." Another remarked: "Wow. Looks so different but her voice and mannerisms give it away." While a third admirer noted: "Lovely woman inside and out, then and now." Another user remarked: "Her accent has changed quite a bit, she's definitely not as posh as she is in this clip. I think she's fab." One also commented: "I would never have recognised her." A different user noted: "Her hairstyle suits her so much more than having a fringe 1⁄2 way down her face. The natural colour looks better too." Winkleman's television journey began in 1992 with an appearance on the BBC series Holiday. In the mid '90s, she even featured on This Morning as a reporter, getting the scoop on lots of celebrity news. Her breakthrough TV role came in 2001 with Central Weekend, a regional debate show. Subsequently, she went on to present Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two and later joined the main show. In recent times, Winkleman has been at the helm of several shows including The Great British Sewing Bee, The Big Fat Anniversary Quiz, Britain's Best Home Cook and The Traitors UK. Tech Advisor reports that recording for season 4 of The Traitors UK is set for this spring or summer, teasing a potential return to our screens in early January 2026. Meanwhile, the BBC excitedly announced on Instagram: "The time for talk is over... The Traitors has been commissioned for a fourth series as well as a nine-part celebrity version for iPlayer and BBC One - and series three has already been filmed in the Scottish Highlands. "But that's not all - The Traitors: Uncloaked is set to make a comeback on @bbcsounds and iPlayer too!"
Irish Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Genius Game review: David Tennant's shameless Traitors rip-off is a baffling blur of lies
BBC's breakout hit show, The Traitors , has a lot to answer for. With a flick of her fringe, presenter Claudia Winkleman has unleashed a deluge of copycat social deduction gameshows in which members of the public wander around tastefully appointed rooms, conspiring like crazy. Most recently, there was Netflix's Million Dollar Secret – which at least had the bonus of being easy to follow. That is not a claim that can be made of ITV's baffling Genius Game (Virgin Media One, Wednesday, 9pm) – a show so complicated that at one point, one of the contestants (a doctor) admits she has no idea what is going on. Join the club. It's a million times fiddlier than The Traitors – yet so much less bingeable. In the Winkleman role of cruel and mocking host is David Tennant , conjuring with his Doctor Who eccentric boffin vibes. But unlike Winkleman, he isn't physically present and dials in his ripe banter by video link – as if he had better things to do than attend to a shameless Traitors copycat. In its defence, Genius Game predates Traitors in so far as it is based on a Korean gameshow — the series that also inspired the Netflix hit Squid Game . But the ITV version is very Traitors: there is a suite of rooms where the contestants are encouraged to conspire and lie to each other to their heart's content. There is even an early sacrificial victim in the shape of gambling expert Paul, who gets in the bad books of university lecturer Ben and is chucked into a gold cell for his troubles. His transgression, it would appear, is to be proactive and try to win the game – a strategy that has earned him the eternal enmity of top fusspot Ben. As to the game ... well, I have no idea. It's a social deduction affair in the tradition of card games such as Ultimate Werewolf or Secret Hitler – only a zillion times more complicated. Tennant, for his sins, has to explain the rules several times – by the end, he sounds as baffled as he did when the Weeping Angels were stalking him on Doctor Who. READ MORE What's it all about? Something like this: punters have the option to steal imaginary gold by staging a 'heist' or passing – but there's only so much pretend loot. Steal enough and they win fake crystals that can be used in future challenges; go overboard and filch too much and there isn't enough to around – and then something bad happens. To repeat, I'm explaining something I don't understand – but neither do many of the contestants, resulting in a hodgepodge that will turn even the biggest fans of the Traitors into haters of the format. It doesn't take a genius to work out that this show deserves to be sent straight to the dunce's corner.
