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desire to continue a formal education by going on to study for A-levels, Instead she decided to follow her sister Natalie and go to the local Casio College in Langley Road, Watford, which Andrew Ridgeley had attended a few years before. If she had been a bit older Geri might have seen him and George Michael perform there with their original band, the Executive.

Geri studied a curious mixture of finance, travel and tourism, which didn’t suit her. She decided that she was just wasting precious time, promptly left and started dancing. She had no proper training so would just improvise and hope for the best. She had developed a curvaceous figure and was soon noticed around the London clubs. She was paid £40 for dancing on a Saturday night – and Sunday morning – at the Crazy Club and the house-music extravaganzas held at the Astoria in Charing Cross Road.

      Geri moved out of Jubilee Road, staying for a while in a terraced house owned by her half-sister Karen and her husband in the Watford suburb of South Oxhey. She had to leave after she had invited everyone in the Game Bird pub to a party at the house. Word got round: two hundred people turned up and wrecked the place. Shamefaced, Geri moved into a squat on a nearby council estate.

      Newly independent, Geri had to buy her own food. This was not necessarily a good thing because she was worrying for the first time about her weight. As a result, she did something she later claimed was ‘the biggest mistake of my life’ – she went on a diet. The trigger had been a throwaway remark by one of her fellow dancers about her being a bit plump. She had been a fussy eater as a child – avoiding vegetables if she could – but at least then her mum, who could be quite strict, could keep an eye on her. Left to her own devices she wasn’t eating properly at all.

At least she was saving money. She much preferred to spend what little she had on going out. These were carefree times in the late eighties and Geri became an enthusiastic embracer of the ‘Second Summer of Love’. This was the acid-house culture that had sprung up during 1988 and ballooned into the giant illegal rave events around the M25. Watford was the perfect starting point for dressing up, piling into cars and vans and heading off to the next party location. The Game Bird in Hartspring Lane was close to the M1 and the best kicking-off point in the area – no wonder Geri’s party was mobbed.

      Geri was sixteen when she went to her first rave and at seventeen was an old hand. But her cavalier outlook on life took a temporary knock when she discovered a small lump in her right breast and needed an emergency operation to have it removed. Fortunately, it was benign but Geri always felt she was one of the lucky ones and, in the future, would strongly encourage young women to be mindful of breast cancer and make sure they checked their breasts regularly.

      She found out that she could earn more money abroad so decided to try her luck in the fashionable Mediterranean clubs. At nineteen, she was a dancer at the world-famous BCM Planet Dance club in Magaluf. ‘Dancing’ is a loose term because in effect she was writhing around in a cage ten feet or so above the dance floor. To begin with, she was given a week’s trial by the manager but soon proved to be one of the most popular dancers, dressed in a variety of wigs, bra tops and leather shorts. Geri, it seemed, had mastered the art of flirtation. As one of her close friends observed, ‘She was very good at making you feel special.’

      Rather like Melanie Brown in Blackpool, Geri seemed to enjoy her freedom away from her home town and, by all accounts, had a wild few months in the Spanish sun. Kelly Smith, another of her friends from those days, recalled, ‘She was a party animal and didn’t mind showing herself off.’

      Aside from dancing in a cage, Geri was doing little more than thousands of teenagers enjoying a month or two in the Spanish sun. It was a rite of passage but, despite the fun, she didn’t lose her focus or ambition.

During her time in Mallorca, she shared a flat with another dancer who had some topless pictures taken by a local photographer. Geri decided to do the same. She had visions of becoming a star in the very lucrative world of glamour modelling. Perhaps this would be her passport to the fame she so desperately wanted – she never tired of telling people she was going to achieve it. Kelly remarked, ‘We thought it was funny when she went on and on about becoming a big star.’

      On her return to England, she signed up with what she called the ‘dodgiest agency you could imagine’ but secured one or two decent jobs, including a jeans advert. She also did a Page 3 session for the Sun but the shots weren’t used. Geri found the topless work boring. She told the chat show host Michael Parkinson, ‘I found it very dull – standing there with a window open to keep your nipples firm was not good.’ She had to navigate a dodgy world of casting agents who for no good reason would ask her to strip at auditions for non-nude parts. On these occasions she would make a rapid exit.

      Another drawback was the constant scrutiny of her shape. Apparently a photographer made a casual remark about her weight and that was all it took for Geri once again to believe she was fat. Her sparky, fearless demeanour masked an all-too-familiar story of vulnerability.

      She was already displaying a fearsome energy that never seemed to run out. She had been moved out of the squat by the council and needed to earn to pay the rent on her tiny flat in another unappetising part of town. She taught aerobics, waited tables, washed hair, and found time to do a day course in television presenting run by Reuters.

Her modelling shots led to her next opportunity, providing the glamour on a Turkish game show. It was called Sec Bakalim and was a version of the old US show Let’s Make a Deal. The producer apparently noticed Geri’s photographs and offered her a job that involved flying to Istanbul every weekend. He told her that she would not be wearing a swimsuit – or less – but a tasteful evening gown. She would also have to ‘love that fridge’. Geri, who was struggling to pay the rent, needed the money so she jumped at the chance to earn a couple of hundred pounds a show.

      She wasn’t the presenter. She was the attractive young woman in a movie star dress, who smiled in front of the prizes that the contestants were trying to win. An unexpected bonus was that she was asked for her autograph for the very first time. She enjoyed the experience. Spending time in Istanbul was no hardship and she decided she would accept the role again if she was asked back.

      She acquired new representation, Talking Heads in Barnes, run by broadcaster and voiceover maestro John Sachs and well-known agent Anthony Blackburn. They readily saw how appealing Geri was. She was still devouring the Stage every week and going to auditions. One was for a small part in a West End comedy. It didn’t go well but, significantly, the director asked her, ‘Geri, what’s the last thing you’ve read? I bet it was Cosmopolitan.’ And it was.

      She resolved to catch up on her education and so, at the age of twenty, enrolled for an English-language course at Watford College in Hempstead Road. She had grown up a lot and, for the first time, felt she ‘understood the wealth and power of words’. She studied Hamlet, loved Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence, and discovered the genius of Oscar Wilde.

      She was in class when she received the message from her brother that their dad had died. She had just got back from a weekend in Istanbul where she was working on her second game-show season. She said, ‘I was distraught. I felt that he had been snatched away from me.’ She has talked openly about her grief and specifically being in denial that he had gone, even though she went to visit his body at the hospital.

Her description of seeing his body is heartbreaking: ‘He was lying there and all his nails were black – everything was black. His features were sunk. He looked like the Penguin in the film Batman II. It is a horrible memory of my father. It was hideous.’

      She dragged herself into college and even joined everyone on a class trip to the West End to see Alan Cumming’s outstanding portrayal of Hamlet at the Donmar Warehouse. The actor would go on to become a familiar figure on British television through his starring roles in US series, including The Good Wife and Instinct. His 1993 Hamlet, however, was arguably the highlight of his career. Geri was enthralled and forgot her own tragedy for a precious hour or two.

      After her father’s death, she suffered from bouts of both bulimia and anorexia. She was so down. ‘I wanted to kill myself. I could not function.

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