‘i’ve kept my promise to my dying mum’

It has been a tough year for Amy Nuttall. The former Emmerdale star broke up with her husband of 11 years Andrew Buchan in August following allegations of him cheating, before losing her mum to a glioblastoma brain tumour in October.

Five months on, Amy is still dealing with the loss of her mum Elaine, and recently admitted that she had experienced “one of the hardest” days of grief so far. She has just released a single in her memory, called Thank You Mother, for The Brain Tumour Charity.

When we catch up with Amy, 41, at the Smiley Charity Film Awards in London, she is preparing to perform the song live. “It’s my first time singing live in about 15 years, so quite a long time,” she tells us.

“This song wasn’t in the public domain. It was written by a songwriter called John Hurley, and I was introduced to it many years ago when I was in my early twenties. I was invited to sing it for Gloria Hunniford at an event in London after her lovely daughter Caron [Keating] passed away, so it’s been with me all these years and I’ve never forgotten it.

“Then I remembered this song when my mum was given weeks to a couple of months to live. I thought, ‘I’ve got to find it and bring it back up to my parents’ house and play it.’ It was in my mum’s final week that I blasted it throughout the house.

“I was in the dining room at my parents’ house – my sister was in the kitchen and my dad was sat with my mum, who was in a hospital bed in the lounge. And he walked in weeping, and he whispered, ‘Your mum said play it again,’ shortly before she lost the ability to speak, so it was a very emotional time, as you can imagine. We played it many times. Later, my sister turned to me and said, ‘Hang on a minute, you’re a singer, you should be singing this. Why are you not singing it?’

“So, she planted the seed and I’d made a promise to my mum.

Before she died, she said, ‘You must use your platform to do some good and raise some awareness.’ We hadn’t heard the word glioblastoma before my mum was diagnosed back in July.”

Amy says she has no plans to release more music, but would “absolutely love to sing more”.

When asked who she would like to team up with for her dream collaboration, she replies, “Josh Groban. My mum loved him