Emmerdale’s Lucy Pargeter splits from fiancé Rudi Coleano

Emmerdale's Lucy Pargeter has announced she has split from her fiancé Rudi Coleano.

The 42-year-old has been engaged to Rudi for 12 years and the pair have three children together, daughters Lola, 13, and two-year-old twins Betsy and Missy.

Lucy, who has played Chas Dingle on the ITV soap since 2002, released a statement on Friday regarding the split, which read, “Lucy Pargeter has confirmed she has separated from her long-term partner, Rudi Coleano, and, while no longer together, their main priority is raising their three daughters.”

The pair struggled to conceive for 11 years, before the soap star gave birth to twins in 2017 after having two rounds of IVF.

She was open about the birth after the twins were born via C-section, revealing she was 'gutted' she was unable to watch the birth.

She said: "I wanted to watch the whole thing but they put a screen up when you're having a C-section and it couldn't be lowered quite enough for me to see.

"In some hospitals there are mirrors on the ceiling so you can see what's going on, but that wasn't the case in mine.

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"I was gutted I didn't get to watch them being born."

Lucy later appeared on This Morning and explained that more needed to be done to raise awareness.

She said: "There's a massive chunk of education that needs to be given to women about not being able to get pregnant. Getting pregnant can be, and often is as you get older, an awful lot harder.

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"I WISH people would talk about it more. I really want to do something in raising awareness around fertility in older women, because it's something that isn't spoken about and it should be."

Despite having three children together and being engaged for 12 years, Lucy and Rudi never got married.

However they came very close back in 2012, as Lucy revealed at the time: "We were in Dubai about a month ago and we said: 'Sod it, while we're here, let's do it'.

"Then I thought all our mates would be like, 'Oh cheers, thanks for the invite'."