She was 23, ambitious, and had her whole career ahead of her. So why did Amanda Holden walk down the aisle with a man 17 years her senior? The answer, it turns out, is more complicated than the tabloids ever let on.
Long before Les Dennis ever entered the picture, Amanda was dropping hints about the kind of man she was drawn to. On 21 September 1991, a 19-year-old Holden appeared on Cilla Black’s Blind Date as a drama student at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. She hadn’t even planned to audition — she’d tagged along to support a heartbroken friend but ended up on the show anyway.
When Cilla asked which celebrity she’d most like to spend time with, Amanda’s answer raised eyebrows across the studio. “Jack Nicholson,” she said. Cilla was baffled — “a young girl like you?” — but Amanda held her ground, declaring she liked “experienced, mature men.” The audience roared. Nobody thought much of it at the time.
Two years later, she’d fall for a man 17 years older than her.
How They Actually Met
The summer of 1993 brought Amanda Holden to Bournemouth for her first significant professional stage role, playing Liesl Von Trapp in The Sound of Music at the Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre. Les Dennis, then at the height of his fame hosting ITV’s Family Fortunes, was performing in the comedy Don’t Dress For Dinner at nearby Bournemouth Pier.
They crossed paths at a first-night party at the Pavilion Theatre. Les later recalled the setting warmly: “It was a summer when there were a lot of mates around, it seemed to be an endless string of parties.” Their first impressions of each other were, charitably, mixed. Amanda wrote in her 2013 autobiography No Holding Back that he “seemed sad, quiet and troubled,” adding with characteristic honesty that she thought he was “a bit of a miserable sod.” Les found her “loud, overconfident and a bit brash.”
Not exactly love at first sight, then. But something was there. Their friendship developed through group bowling trips and casual hangouts, and Les gradually opened up about his personal struggles, including the end of his first marriage and his difficult relationship with his son. Amanda’s instinct, she admitted, was to want to help him.
“I don’t think I consciously fancied him at this stage,” she wrote. Within weeks, though, the relationship had gone public, and the press had already made up their minds. Red-top tabloids quickly cast Les as a vulnerable has-been and Amanda as a calculating social climber. Neither portrait was particularly fair.
The Wedding and the Years That Followed
After roughly two years together, the couple married on 4 June 1995 at St. Andrew’s Church, Richmond Hill, in Bournemouth — the same seaside town where they’d met. Amanda was 24. Les was 41. The wedding was covered exclusively by HELLO! magazine, with the couple on the cover.
They settled in Highgate, north London, and by all outward appearances made a solid go of it. Amanda’s career was accelerating fast, with roles in EastEnders, the ITV comedy Kiss Me Kate, and various television appearances. Les continued fronting Family Fortunes. They attended premieres, charity events, and awards ceremonies together throughout the late 1990s, cutting an impressive — if slightly mismatched — figure on the red carpet.
One story from that period says everything about the dynamic the outside world could see, even if they couldn’t. On Grand National Day, a plumber came to fix their washing machine. Amanda rushed in asking Les for money to place a bet. The plumber glanced at the two of them and said, cheerfully: “Kids, eh?” He assumed she was Les’s daughter. Les later reflected, with characteristic dry wit: “Maybe I should have known then.”
What Drew Her to Him
Amanda herself has always been more candid about the age gap than most celebrities would dare to be. When asked whether she’d been seeking a father figure — she was raised largely by her mother and stepfather — she didn’t dismiss it outright.
“I don’t know because I’ve never done therapy,” she said, “but there is a sort of safety in a relationship like that. I was very young and I had a lot to learn about life.”
As a 19-year-old, she’d declared a preference for older men on national television. At 23, she’d married one. Whether it was a conscious choice or simply a pattern she hadn’t yet examined, the connection seems real enough. And to her credit, she has never tried to dress it up as something it wasn’t.
The Affair and the Fallout
In 2000, everything unravelled. Amanda met actor Neil Morrissey — best known for Men Behaving Badly and voicing Bob the Builder — while filming the BBC comedy Happy Birthday Shakespeare. In a painful coincidence, Les Dennis appeared in the same production. The affair between Amanda and Morrissey lasted approximately five weeks, but the tabloid fallout consumed years.
Les was arguably more famous than Amanda at the time, which meant public sympathy landed squarely in his corner. The press nicknamed him “Les Misérables.” Amanda described the aftermath with unflinching honesty: “I found the fall from grace incredibly hard to deal with. I can’t bear not to be liked. Then I had an affair and overnight turned into this awful person.”
She later told the Daily Mail: “I brought it on myself, I appreciate that, but nothing will ever be as bad again. It was a very dark time. It got to the point where I felt I could hardly breathe.”
The couple attempted a reconciliation in 2001, but it was already over in everything but name. Then came Celebrity Big Brother 2 in November 2002, where Les entered the house visibly struggling. The defining moment was when host Davina McCall told him Amanda had sent a video message. He watched it with growing dread, noting she never said “I love you” or “I’m proud of you.” He wrote in his memoir Must The Show Go On?: “I came to the final decision that this charade of a marriage was over.” He finished as runner-up to Mark Owen. He later credited the experience with kickstarting his acting reinvention, noting that Ricky Gervais’s call about Extras came directly as a result.
Why She Knew It Had to End
Amanda has been brutally honest about the moment she understood the marriage couldn’t continue. “I am very broody,” she admitted. “I terribly want children but I didn’t want to have them with Les. That’s a horribly brutal thing to say, but when you do, you know you have to move on.”
It was Amanda who suggested the divorce. Their split was finalised in November 2003, with the divorce granted on grounds of Les’s adultery — he had begun seeing Leoni Cotgrove while Amanda was already with music executive Chris Hughes. Both had moved on before the paperwork caught up.
Les Found the Funny Side
To his credit, Les Dennis has handled the whole saga with more grace than most people could manage. The Bob the Builder punchline became something of a signature. On Christopher Biggins’s podcast in June 2021, he recalled performing pantomime alongside Hollywood legend Mickey Rooney in Sunderland. Christmas music would play before each show, including Frank Sinatra songs — which drove Rooney to fury, because Sinatra had famously stolen his wife, Ava Gardner. Les drew the parallel dryly: “It would’ve been like me having to listen to Bob the Builder every night.”
Neil Morrissey, for his part, offered a partial apology on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories in 2014, saying he felt sorry “for how emotional Les seemed to become.” On a podcast in 2023, he condensed his life advice to three points, the third being: “Don’t f*** a game-show host’s wife.”
Where They Both Ended Up
Both came out the other side with full lives and genuine happiness. Les met Claire Nicholson in 2005 and married her in 2009. They have two children, Eleanor Grace and Thomas Christopher, and Les has described himself as “the happiest and most contented I’ve ever been.” He joined Coronation Street, appeared on Strictly Come Dancing, and is currently touring in Waitress.
Amanda married record producer Chris Hughes in December 2008. They have two daughters, Lexi and Hollie Rose. She has continued as a Britain’s Got Talent judge and Heart Breakfast co-host, launched the BBC quiz show The Inner Circle in 2025, and made her Netflix debut in Cheat: Unfinished Business.
In June 2023, Les told The Sunday Times: “We’re not in touch but I am happy that she’s happy. I can watch Britain’s Got Talent without getting angry. All the hurt that has happened has been healed.”
Amanda, reflecting on the whole chapter in January 2026, put it simply: “As much as I regret hurting people maybe, or causing chaos, it shapes you to who you are in this moment. I think life is too short to have regrets.”
It’s a composed way to close one of British tabloid history’s most turbulent love stories. A 24-year-old who wanted safety and found it, briefly, with an older man — and then had to find her own way out the other side. Both of them did.
