Vanessa Perroncel

Short Biography

Vanessa Perroncel is an actress, known for The Phantom of the Opera (2004), GMTV (1993) and Tonight (1999). She was born in Bandol in the south of France in 1976; her parents divorced when she was five and she moved to Paris with her mother. She worked as a model in Paris in the 1990s – she was scouted as a teenager – and she enjoyed it although, "I didn't like it when we were expected to have dinner with older men..." She is referring to the industry executives, photographers and money men who can assume that socialising with the beautiful young clothes horses in their employ is a perk of the position. "It seemed exploiting and I saw the drugs and the sex... I didn't like it. I was always causing a drama about it, threatening to leave my agency! Ranting about why do I have to spend time with these fat, ugly, old men! When I wanted to be off out with my friends and the male models my own age!"She acted a little ("in TV programmes like the French version of Saved by the Bell") and spent the summers working in expensive night clubs in St Tropez. "There was a scene, we were a close group; they were my friends and we looked out for each other." When she moved to London, in 1999, she modelled some more; in 2003 she took up a job as a VIP table runner at the Elysium nightclub in central London: a glam, upmarket venue that attracted a footballer clientele, among other VIPs.This is how she met Wayne Bridge in 2004, "when I was working, by the way, because I wanted to earn extra money, not because I was plotting to meet a footballer. Not because I was studying the back pages for fixture lists and transfer lists or any of this crap the papers made up. There are girls who do that, yes. I am not one of them." I hadn't suggested otherwise, but you can forgive Perroncel if she gets preemptively defensive from time to time.Perroncel and Bridge never married, but they were together for five years, during which time she gave birth to Jaydon. In the grand scheme of these things, theirs was a low-key life.