When Lottie's half-brother Louis shot to fame with One Direction she was only 12 years old and seemed to have the world at her feet. After leaving school she joined their team as a make-up artist, and by 2015, she was flying first-class around the world with the boyband. But by the age of 20, she had tragically lost both her beloved mother and sister in the space of a few short years, and was struggling to cope.
Lottie’s mother Johannah Deakin died from leukaemia in 2016, just seven months after she was diagnosed. Her parents had split aged 13, and she was estranged from her biological father, prompting her to move home to Doncaster. Loaded with grief, Lottie gave up her career to care for her five younger siblings - Félicité, then 16, twins Phoebe and Daisy, 12, and twins Doris and Ernie, who were only two – along with her grandmother and the younger twins’ father Dan.
Describing the move back home, she says she had no regret: “I needed to be there for the little ones. It was just an instinct. And we've all got that in us because of how my mum brought us up. We’re all very maternal and we all care about each other so much. My work was important to me but nothing's more important than your family and they needed me.”
But while she put on a brave face, she struggled behind the scenes. “I thought that my life was never, ever going to be happy again,” she recollects. “I thought that I would always live with this pain.” Just three weeks before Johannah died, Lottie remembers suffering one of her lowest moods. “We’d held on to a lot of hope so to find out that she wasn’t going to make it was just unbearable. I remember sitting on the bathroom floor sobbing.
“It was worse than the moment she actually passed because that was when I realised what was going to happen. It hit me really, really hard,” she said. Tragedy then struck again as sister Félicité, 18, died from an accidental overdose of of cocaine, painkillers and anti-anxiety medication in March 2019, as she struggled to cope. “Over and over again, I kept screaming, ‘No, my baby sister. No!’,” she says of the day she heard the heartbreaking news. “The pain was all-consuming.”
After their mother’s death, no one offered Lottie and her young siblings any bereavement support. Her friend and mentor, One Direction stylist, hair and make-up artist Lou Teasdale, encourage Lottie to seek therapy from the Sue Ryder bereavement charity. The therapy was a turning point, and now Lottie, who has 4.8 million Instagram followers, wants to help others struggling with similar losses. “If people are going through a dark time, I want them to see that you can overcome that.
“In my darkest times, I didn’t think I’d be happy again, I was really, really convinced of that. And there’ll be a lot of people in that same place.” Today, she’s all about looking for the positives - she is engaged to former tennis player Lewis Burton, became a mum to son Lucky nearly two years ago, and is expecting a second baby due in January. She drew on her strength to return to work six months after her mother’s death, having fallen in love with make-up aged 12.
Her mother arranged for her to assist Lou on the tours, and the pair started filming make-up tutorials which they shared on social media. By the age of 19, she had thrown herself into her career and launched her own tanning brand Tanologist. Her latest project is wellness app Verdure, which began after she sought to lose weight after the birth of her son. After meeting a personal trainer who educated her about the life-changing benefits of fitness and nutrition, she launched an app offering exercise plans.
The greatest turning point for Lottie’s mental wellbeing came from motherhood. “Having Lucky was the light at the end of my tunnel. He’s everything I ever dreamed of. I’m just so happy and I feel so lucky to have him.” She tells her story in her new book Lucky Girl – which she hopes will reach others who are struggling. “With my mum, I buried my head in the sand and bottled things up which left me in some really dark places. I was letting that go every few months and, when it did come up, it was unbearable pain because I wasn’t dealing with it properly.”
She initially resisted the offer of therapy - but now knows how beneficial it is. “I was really against it, saying, ‘How is sitting down with someone and talking going to help?’ But Lou said, ‘Just try it’. And that’s what I always say to people in two minds about therapy. Just try it. It honestly changed my life. “With my mum, there were a lot of stages of grief and a long anger stage. There was a long, ‘why me?’ stage.
“With my sister, I was feeling it because I was speaking about it. So it just made it more manageable for me mentally. Just an hour a week to open up to someone unbiased who can give you professional advice helps you to work through the emotions. It was completely life-changing. They have amazing services – workshops, trained therapists who give free sessions, and grief cafes where people can chat to other people going through the same thing. Grief can be so consuming because you feel so lonely, like no one can understand you. So being able to talk to people in a similar situation is so comforting.”
She is calling for health professionals to automatically offer a pathway of support to all bereaved families - and has become a campaigner for Sue Ryder, to raise awareness of the support they offer. Today, Lottie looks back on that devastating day when she realised her mother was dying as a defining experience. “That’s the moment that drives what I do because, in that moment, I thought that my life would never be happy again. I thought I was going to live a really sad life. And it's so hard to think back to that time, especially knowing now how happy I am. So that's a big motivation for Lucky Girl and I hope that I can show people that they can overcome grief too.”
Meanwhile, Lottie Tomlinson, who revealed she was expecting her second child with her fiancé Lewis Burton last month, has told her fans her son Lucky, 22 months, will soon have a little sister. Taking to Instagram on Sunday to reveal the news to her 4.8 million followers, she shared a picture of a cake with pink icing, captioning it: 'The most surreal feeling ever, my baby girl, a dream come true.’
Lucky Girl by Lottie Tomlinson, £22 (Bonnier) is out now. For bereavement support, visit sueryder.org