Michelle Collins used chewing gum to ‘save night’ as tooth falls out in panto

Former EastEnders actress Michelle Collins came up with a brilliant way to hide her missing tooth as she took part in a pantomime in Dorset

Michelle Collins has revealed how she had to cover a gaping hole with chewing gum as her tooth fell out mid performance.

The former EastEnders and Coronation Street star, 59, is portraying the wicked queen Nightshade in Beauty and the Beast in Poole, Dorset, and has opened up on the slight mishap.

The actress confessed that she replaced her missing tooth with chewing gum in a bid to hide the incident from the audience.

The Daily Star reports that she said: “[Fellow actor] Chris [Jarvis] and Sam our company manager we’re running around trying to help while I am panicking.

“Anyway chewing gum saved the night. I just stuck it over the hole and I went on for the second act, thank god I had finished singing.

“I sounded like Janet Street Porter with a lisp. Oh what a night.”

Since the incident, Michelle has undergone emergency surgery to fix the tooth in time for her next performance.

The fiasco came shortly after the star urged members of the public to attend pantomimes during the Covid crisis.

Speaking to the Bournemouth Echo, she said: “I think it’s really tough trying to do a panto in Covid because it’s completely different from olden times, we’re all having to wear masks, we take Covid tests every day, we only have two understudies and we’re all in bubbles, we know how important it is that we’re safe as well as protecting the audience.

“We really are putting a lot of effort into the safety precautions to the point where it was kind of stressful in the beginning, having to get up early and having to test but after a while you kind of get used to it because I think this is going to be the way of the world.

“The hardest thing is having to try and act and sing with masks on, I think we’re all kind of terrified that if one person gets it then we don’t want to have to close, it will be every disappointing for us but mostly for the audience because I think people are desperate to see shows again.”

Michelle is perhaps most famous for her role as Cindy Beale in EastEnders – a character she played between 1988 and 1998.

She later joined rival show Coronation Street and took up the role of Stella Price between 2011 and 2013.

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