The 'Mysterious Girl' singer had been battling mental health issues for years and losing his brother just broke him.
Singer Peter Andre was top of the charts in the UK in the mid-1990s when his song Mysterious Girl was released. He had been working in the entertainment industry in Australia since he was 16 and later in the UK. But, at the top of his fame in 1998, he vanished from the scene due to personal reasons. Reasons that would resurface years later when he went through a tragedy and didn't understand how to process his grief.
Now, a reality TV star in the UK, Andre, 47, revealed that his wife, Emily, was the biggest support he had and held their relationship together when he was going through a difficult time. The singer had suffered mental health issues in the late 1990s and decided to take a step back from work after going through panic attacks and anxiety. He had then returned to the silver screen on 2004's edition of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, according to Daily Mail.
"I couldn’t breathe. I ended up in hospital, and the panic attacks would come one after another. Years later, after therapy, I realized it all stemmed from that fear of being killed," he told the Guardian. "I know it sounds dramatic,” he said. He feared being killed since he was attacked at a night club in Sydney when he was in his 20s. "This guy grabbed me in a nightclub in Sydney. He pushed me into the bathroom, pulled out a knife and put it on my neck, and said: 'Give me a reason I shouldn’t finish you off.' He kept picking at me with the knife." The man let him go and said, "You better watch your every step because when we decide the time’s right, we’re going to finish you."
The anxiety and panic led him to stay in bed for months. So, when his brother, Andrew died after a battle with kidney cancer, aged 54 in December 2012, he mistook his grief for the anxiety he had experienced earlier.
He had been dating Emily, 30, a junior doctor, for only a year then and gave her an option to leave him. "I said, 'You can either stay and stick with me through this, which personally I wouldn’t, or you can go'." But, Emily wasn't ready to let him wallow alone. "It’s not even a question. We’re going to get through it together," she told him.
After that, they fell for each other quickly and they got hitched in 2015. Though, initially, he wasn't sure about her, which is why he hadn't let his two kids, Junior and Princess, with former wife, Katie Price, know her as his girlfriend. "I just didn’t think it was right to have a woman coming into their lives unless we were both serious," he told The Sunday Times. His kids knew her as "Aunty Em."
Eventually, when things heated up between them and he knew he wanted to propose to her, he first asked permission from her father. "When you meet a proper, beautiful, educated lady like Emily, if you want to be taken seriously then you put in 100% straight away. I was not easy to be with [when his brother died], but the fact that she said, 'We’ll get through this together,' I knew meant we’d be together for the rest of our lives," said the father-of-four.
The couple has two children, 6-year-old Millie and Theo, 3. Andre says that his wife wants to give them a normal life even though their father is a huge celebrity in the UK. "Emily doesn’t want Theo and Millie in the public eye at all, which I respect because they weren’t born into it. Junior and Princess were born into it," he told the Guardian. The family man added that he is happiest with his wife and four kids now than ever before in his adult life.
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