Martine McCutcheon has revealed that her father threatened to drop her from a balcony when she was a baby.
In an interview with The Guardian, the actress - who married Jack McManus in 2012 - has recalled the harrowing event from her childhood while reminiscing about her parents.
The actress said of her father, "Mum suffered domestic abuse at his hands and, when I was a baby, he threatened to drop me over a balcony when he was high.
Talking of their relationship, she added, "Mum was really attractive, but couldn’t understand his fascination with her. The bottom line was that they were both broken.
"He could sense she had had difficult times and wanted to fix her, but it became a dysfunctional, obsessive love.
"My father also had drink and drug problems – he would see red and do horrific things."
She added that her father was "very handsome and charismatic" and explained that "beautiful women fell at his feet."
Martine, who starred as Tiffany Mitchell on EastEnders for three years, has previously talked about the incident while appearing on Loose Women and spoken out about him threatening both her and her mother.
"We lived in like a Peabody Estate in East London, and he threatened to drop me over if she didn’t do what he wanted her to do when he was high as a kite one day," she told the hosts.
"My mum mistook his obsession for love, drugs and drink were involved with him and he would do the most terrible things and he wouldn't remember what he had done.
"He'd be so sorry to begin with. I would see this happen and once I was started to be affected by it, physically by my dad and being used as a weapon against my mum, that was it, my mum kind of just sort of saw clearly all of a sudden that she wasn’t meant to be going through this."
After their relationship deteriorated, the Love Actually star moved to the countryside with her family and they were forced to have panic buttons installed in their home.
Martine explained, "Finally when I was nine years old, I went to the Old Bailey and I spoke to the judge about what happened to me, what happened to my mum and an injunction was put against him and he wasn’t allowed obviously within a certain radius of me and my mum until I was 18.”
The star now has a happy family of her own with McManus, after they welcomed their son Rafferty in 2015 and it seems she finally has the happy ending she'd always longed for.
"Motherhood has made me so much more content," she added. "Rafferty has given me a new excitement and enthusiasm for the simple things in life that I didn’t always have in my own childhood. He is a miracle. The final piece in the jigsaw."
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