Charlotte Church has revealed that she faced kidnap threats as a teenage star.
The Welsh singer, 33, found fame at the age of 11 when she sang Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Pie Jesu over the telephone on This Morning with Richard and Judy in 1997.
But rocketing to fame at such an early age took a toll on her and her mother Maria’s relationship.
Speaking on This Morning, the classical singer said: “I don’t think anything went wrong, it was like a pressure cooker. It was an intense situation.
“You’ve got the stuff going on with the press. On another level mum and dad were dealing with the security level we had going on.
“There were a couple of kidnap plots when I was a kid. We were living in each other’s pockets.”
Church and her mother spoke ahead of the release of a one-off Channel 4 documentary Charlotte Church: My Family & Me, about growing up in the spotlight.
Maria said she had struggled with being portrayed as a pushy mother.
She said: “That’s the one thing I despised and hated, how I was portrayed by some people. It was very, very hard. I was demonised.
“I was basically called the ‘Welsh dragon from hell’, ‘mother from hell’. And I just thought it was very, very unfair because I was put in this position with these big companies like Sony and I was well out of my depth.
“And I think I did pretty well. I used to battle for Charlotte like you wouldn’t believe.”
This Morning airs weekdays at 10.30am on ITV.
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