Natalie Cassidy has played Sonia Fowler in EastEnders on and off for 32 years but has confirmed she’ll be leaving the soap – here’s what we know about her life away from cameras…
Natalie Cassidy, the talented actress behind EastEnders’ iconic character Sonia Fowler, is bidding farewell to the BBC soap after an impressive 32-year stint. Having joined the show at just 10 years old, Natalie has been an on-and-off fixture in Albert Square.
Her final scenes are set to be filmed in February, leaving fans eagerly anticipating whether Sonia will meet a dramatic demise or depart in a more memorable fashion. In a heartfelt statement, Natalie expressed her mixed emotions, feeling “extremely sad” yet “very excited” to embark on new adventures.
While she hinted at exploring “pastures new,” the mum-of-two has a bustling life beyond EastEnders…
Natalie hosts the popular podcast series Life With Nat, where she engages in lively conversations with loved ones, friends, and occasional celebrity guests about their lives. As her Instagram bio reveals, Natalie wears multiple hats: “mum, fiancée, auntie, actress, podcaster, and joker.” She also partners with brands as an ambassador, showcasing her versatility, reports the Mirror.
On the personal front, Natalie shares her life with fiancé Marc Humphreys, a cameraman, and their two children, Eliza and Joanie. The couple met in 2014 while working on EastEnders, and Natalie has affectionately referred to Marc as her “soulmate”.
In 2015, Natalie and Marc got engaged, and shortly after, they shared the joyful news that they were expecting a child together, whom they later named Joanie. Natalie’s older child, Eliza, has a different father, Adam Cottrell, with whom Natalie had an on-again, off-again relationship from 2009 until their eventual breakup in 2013, following a tumultuous period.
However, Marc revived Natalie’s faith in love, and although the couple has yet to get married, they remain committed to each other. In a candid conversation on the Memory Lane podcast, Natalie touched upon the topic of wedding plans.
She confessed: “Do you know what? It’s a lot of money. No, I tell you what it is; it’s time and budget. It is because I go, ‘I’ll only do something small; I don’t need to…'”. While Natalie would prefer an intimate wedding, she has a penchant for the finer things in life: “I will do it small, but I want to be at The Ledbury. Oh, I want a Michelin star meal or I’m just a bit of a snob genuinely. I’ll want the best flowers, and I will want a designer suit.”
Speaking to OK! back in September, Natalie delved into her personal life, revealing that “everything is very hectic” at the moment and addressing the inevitable “mum guilt” that accompanies balancing work and motherhood. “I get mum guilt all the time, 100 per cent,” she confessed.
“And I think that’s why we need to talk about it more. I don’t think you understand until you have children. People saying, ‘Don’t have children if you want a career’ is ridiculous. It’s an ignorant thing to say.”
Natalie’s refreshing honesty about the ups and downs of motherhood and the importance of open discussions about mum guilt will undoubtedly resonate with many. “We’re not living in the 1950s, Dad doesn’t go to work while Mum stays at home. But we don’t have the infrastructure to support families who need to work. The childcare right now just doesn’t work. So all of that needs to be looked at and changed.”
The 41 year old does rely on a nanny for her childcare needs. She shared: “Obviously, you pay a price for having [a nanny], but we wouldn’t be able to do everything without secure and solid childcare. We share our responsibilities on the days that we can, and it’s quite equally divided between us.”
Natalie has always put family first, caring for her father, Charles, in his last days in 2021 after he moved into her home due to declining health. “I bought my current house for him really because it has an annexe,” she revealed.
Reflecting on that period, Natalie recounted: “I was only a carer for him at the very end of his life. I look back, and I don’t actually know how I did it, but I had help from my mother-in-law. The juggling of different generational care is a whole other ball game, really.”
After losing her mother, Evelyn, to bowel cancer in 2002 when she was just 19, Natalie’s bond with her father grew stronger. She previously told us: “That was an age where you don’t want to be at home and you don’t want to be with your parents,” expressing her sense of being robbed of precious time: “I felt robbed of having the time where you come back in your 20s and you want to be with your mum.”
The star also shared a heartfelt confession: “I’ve always felt very guilty that she left the world thinking that I didn’t care. I know she knew that I did, because she’d been a young girl herself and understood, but that was a hard thing to deal with. And that I still deal with to this day.”