A painful breakup from then boyfriend Fabrizio Tassalini along with her exit from her role on Eastenders left Michelle, 51, feeling like she could no longer cope.
Speaking in her new autobiography, Michelle said: “I felt like I’d been tipped overt he edge. I felt like a failure and found myself sinking lower and lower as the days went on, until in the end I couldn’t seem to pull myself out of the hole.”
Michelle had just finished playing Cindy Beale on the iconic BBC One soap and felt under pressure to continue her success as an actress.
It was around the same time that she and Fabrizio, the father of her daughter Mia, broke up.
“I remember swallowing some pills,” she recalled. “There was no definite plan or explicit decision behind my actions. It just happened.
“The question that kept going through my mind was, ‘Would anyone miss me if I wasn’t here?’ Foolishly I somehow decided no one would.”
Looking back now, Michelle can see just how low she must have been to attempt the overdose.
She said: “When I think about what I did now it all sounds very melodramatic, but I guess that’s the nature of depression. How low must I have been to do something like that? It was unthinkable.”
The suicide attempt came as Michelle was filming for her new role in Sunburn in Cyprus, a BBC drama.
Following a night out with friends in Paphos. Someone had made a joke about Michelle’s age and the way she looked, which deeply affected her, and she left the group.
She said: “My mind was cloudy and all I wanted to do was sleep. The cocktail of alcohol and exhaustion sent me into a very dark place. When I got back to the villa I felt like I could hardly breathe, let alone think coherently.
“I remember thinking that I wanted to sleep and deciding I should take a pill to stop me having a headache in the morning. My next thought was that I should just take all of them and that it didn’t matter.”
Michelle did take all of them, but thankfully woke up and was violently sick. She was taken to hospital and kept in for observation.
Thinking back to the events of that night, Michelle said: “I’d never got to that point of utter despair before. And I’m glad to report I haven’t been there since.”
Michelle’s autobiography This Is Me is out on 3 April.