Davina McCall has been a familiar face on British television since the early nineties. Was she adopted when she was younger?
Davina McCall is not adopted. She lived with her biological parents until the age of three, when they divorced. After that, she went to live with her paternal grandparents.
Read on to find out more about Davina McCall’s upbringing.
An Unusual Upbringing
Davina McCall was born in 1967 to a French mother and English father. It’s been widely documented in many interviews that Davina’s upbringing was a particularly troublesome one. Most impactful on Davina was her mother’s alcoholism and ‘wild ways’.
McCall’s parents’ marriage broke down relatively early on in her life, when she was aged just three. At that point, Davina transitioned to living with her paternal grandparents in Surrey, England. Her mother left the country and went back to her native homeland of France, where she would remarry a further four times.
While it was deemed that her mother, Florence, would be a terrible influence on her, Davina still visited her during the holidays. These visits are where her life would ultimately spiral out of control. In an interview, McCall explained that she would drink alcohol and take drugs from as young as thirteen years old when in France.
She expanded, saying her mother would take her to clubs and leave her there. Further, she would dress the then thirteen year old McCall in provocative, revealing clothing. This terrible influence and addictive lifestyle culminated in a near-lethal drug overdose in her mid-twenties.
McCall was rushed to hospital after consuming a cocktail of drugs. This is – as she has explained – the turning point in her life. She described herself as ‘rotting from the inside’ as a result of the drugs and alcohol she regularly consumed. As she approached her thirties, she completely turned her life around.
Success Story
Although her life was pitted with struggles, Davina McCall was adamant that she would succeed. In 1992, when she was twenty six, she was hired to present an MTV show in Europe. This would be the dawning act in a career that would come to span decades, as Davina transitioned from show to show.
McCall primarily gravitated towards presenting, opting to specialize in reality TV shows like Big Brother. She became instantly recognizable as one of the UK’s most prominent TV faces, and even took on some minor acting roles.
One of her key bits in Big Brother was the way she opened each episode with a particular line. They were designed to be comical and witty, and changed with every episode. You can see a compilation with examples of these on YouTube.
As this Twitter post shows, Davina McCall was never averse to bringing the comedy for the viewers of Big Brother in strange ways.
In 2000, Davina McCall married her second husband and subsequently had three children of her own. This portion of her life was a far cry from her youth, and the influence of her biological mother. Strangely, McCall explained in an interview in 2009 that she ‘didn’t blame her mother’ for her substance struggles.
Davina McCall remained the subject of speculation and criticism throughout the late 2000s and 2010s, however. As with many people in the public eye, she was judged heavily on her appearance and figure. However, she didn’t let any of this detract from her success story and boasted on more than one occasion that nothing got to her, or fazed her.
As of 2020, Davina McCall had a net worth of around $4 million, with an impressive range of assets to boot. Following the amicable divorce from her husband in 2019, she moved into a home in England worth around $5 million. That is certainly a rags to riches success story.