Trinny Woodall breaks down recalling how she told daughter that her father took his own life

Makeup mogul and What Not to Wear star Trinny Woodall has collapsed in an Australian interview after describing the moment she had to tell her daughter Lyla that her father had passed away.

Trinny, 58, sat down with journalist Jessica Rowe for an episode of The big talk show on her recent trip Down Under to promote her skincare and makeup line Trinny London.

She got the idea of ​​her stackable cream makeup products at age 50, around the same time that her ex-husband Johnny Elichaoff, who has struggled with an addiction to painkillers for 20 years, jumped off the roof of a parking lot in 2014.

Trinny described how she would co-parent with Mr. Elichaoff from Lyla’s third to her sixth birthday, leave on Sunday to work on her famous fashion show, and return on Friday to spend the weekend with her daughter.

It was the only way the businesswoman could see that the family would be able to provide for their daughter financially.

“When I was 50, Lyla’s father died in tragic circumstances. I had stopped watching TV. I had no income. I lived on the remains of a few books,’ Trinny said.

It was over the course of this year that the idea for Trinny London’s makeup line went from a breeze to a reality.

“I remember I was at my husband’s funeral and after that I had people in my house and I had some really good friends and they said, ‘Trinny, we know you want to start this idea, but you have to be responsible for Lyla. Maybe you should look for a job instead?”

“I told them I can’t be 60 and wish I had started earlier. So they said, send us the business plan when you’re ready, and they were one of the first investors.”

Trinny met her late husband, Mr. Elichaoff, 55, a former musician, in rehab in the 1990s. She has been open about her struggles with cocaine and alcohol addiction in the past.

“We met in recovery. He’d been in a really bad motorcycle accident and he’d been on painkillers…every year of our marriage he was in rehab to deal with that addiction,” she said. They were married for ten years before divorcing in 2009.

“It’s very hard to end a marriage if it’s not like someone ran off with someone else. It’s more of a sense of responsibility that you have to take responsibility for the decision.

“But after that we were good. We spoke every day and by then I had met Charles [Saatchi] also. Then things just started to go wrong for him and he took his own life.’

Trinny recalled the day it happened before she got emotional as she relived what it was like to tell her daughter Lyla, who just turned 11.

“There’s a wonderful woman called Julia Samuel and she wrote a book called Grief Works and she even worked with William and Harry when their mother died,” she said.

“She was simply known as that wonderful person and she happened to be a friend of my sister’s. And the day it happened, my sister said, I’m going to call her.

“Lila was at school and the police came by and I just said, I don’t know how to tell her. So Julia came by and then she said “Just say he had a heart attack in the head”.

“So she came home from school and there will be, oh, I always get mad about this. She came home from school and I took her upstairs and told her. She let out this scream like an animal. And I remember I really hugged her, you know, when you have a child that feels pain, you really hug and I said to her these words that Julia told me and that was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my life . whole life.’

Mr. Elichaoff was previously a rock drummer with the group Stark Naked and the Car Thieves, which toured the world in the 1980s supporting U2 and Siouxsie Sioux.

But he soon gave up the rockstar lifestyle and became a financial advisor, appearing on Channel 4 Four Rooms as an antiques dealer.

Johnny and Trinny were married in 1999 in Knightsbridge at St Columba’s Church, where Miss Woodall was baptized, her parents were married and her grandfather was buried.