Did you know that Amy Winehouse and Dame Barbara Windsor used to be really good mates? Seriously, Amy even used to help Barbara rehearse her EastEnders scripts. (An iconic friendship we can only dream of.) Amy's friend Tyler James has just spoken about the Amy and Barbara's relationship to The Sun, but it's something the late EastEnders actress also revealed in 2012.
The unlikely pair first became friends through her husband, Scott, who had been a friend of the Winehouse family. And when the singer was receiving treatment for alcohol and substance addictions at a clinic near the couple's London home, Scott and Barbara would invite her inside when they spotted her smoking.
'I spotted her one day and said to Scott, "That’s Amy out there having a cigarette, you should go out",' Barbara told the Daily Mirror in 2012. 'He told her to stop sitting outside and come in. Then, whenever she was there, she knew she didn’t have to sit on a wall and could come and see us.'
The actress also told the paper that they both vowed to keep their friendship a secret, and that Amy would often play Peggy when reading through Barbara's scripts. 'There was one really heavy scene between Peggy and Pat where it really kicked off. I pretended to be Peggy and for the first time Amy played Pat,' she continued. 'Afterwards she always insisted on playing Peggy, which was lovely. That was one of our smashing moments. It was lovely and we always said we would never tell anyone.'
Barbara added, 'I kept our friendship private even though she was often in the news. We kept it a secret. We always said our friendship would be very private because we knew what it would be like (in the headlines)... "Friends with Barbara Windsor, what's that all about?"'
After Amy's tragic death in 2011, Amy's father, Mitch, asked Barbara to be a patron of the Amy Winehouse Foundation, a charity set up in her memory.
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