Paul O'Grady's husband 'stayed in the house' after star's death

Paul O'Grady's husband Andre Portasio has opened up on the days after the star's death and how he felt "overwhelmed". He joined Loose Women on Tuesday to share his memories and how he is continuing his husband's charitable legacy.

Live in the studio, Andre told Ruth Langsford, Coleen Nolan, Janet Street-Porter and Brenda Edwards: “I love watching him. Now I’m sort of accepting that he’s gone, it took me quite a long time to get to this position I think. To begin with, it was really a shock.”

Opening up on his loss, Andre said: “I stayed in the house to begin with. I was getting the letters and the flowers and it was too overwhelming to begin with.

“In hindsight now, I can see how much it has really helped me, the support, and really I should thank everyone that wrote to me and just the kindness of everybody really. It will stay with me forever.”

Andre also told the panel he was “shocked” to receive a letter of condolence from Queen Camilla and said: “I must confess, it took me so long to reply. It’s not every day you receive a letter from the Queen so I would wake up and think, ‘I must reply to her letter’ and I would sit down and think, ‘Dear Camilla…’ [mimics throwing away the draft letter] and ‘No…’

“It took me so long. In the end, I was like ‘You’re not writing a book, you’re writing a thank you letter and you just have to go with what is in your heart’. So I finally wrote to her.”

Discussing a memorial service held for Paul, Andre revealed: “It needed to be a celebration you know. Paul was such a character and I didn’t realise, I think until he passed away how popular he was, just by being on TV I suppose and I was always backstage, and I never realised how loved he was.”

Coleen commented: “I’m not sure Paul realised that, he was so loved... He was always Paul and he never changed.”

Andre agreed: “I’m not sure he did. Yeah, the boy from Birkenhead. That’s how he saw himself, he never saw himself as a celebrity or a star.”

Andre also shared an update on the five dogs he shared with Paul: “I opened this letter and it was this old lady, I think she was 85, and she was very worried about the dogs and that the dogs had to say goodbye. That stayed at the back of my mind, and I thought I must attend to what she’s asking me to do.”

He continued: “So, just before he was buried, I took the dogs to say goodbye and it was really interesting to see that some of them engaged with Paul but others just ‘sweeped’ out, as if he wasn’t there.”

Asked by Coleen ‘how the dogs are doing now’ and Andre replied: “They’re doing fabulous!”

Discussing Paul’s charity work, Andre said: “I feel very responsible for what he started. You know, [Paul] was so many facets. He was a great radio DJ, broadcaster, performer and everything else but aside from that, I think he was also very charitable. I think something no one really realised is that most of the charity work that he’s done, was very private. So, I feel I need to take the legacy forward and continue helping the organisations that he helped but also taking it further, so that he can outlive me in that sense.”

He continued: “Just before he passed away, he said to me, ‘Let’s walk the dogs, I have something to show you’ and the surprise was the fruit trees. We had recently built a guest cottage in the grounds and he was looking to do the garden around it. So, he bought those fruit trees and when he passed away, I felt ‘I cannot enjoy them alone’.

“It needs to be somewhere that other people can enjoy and he’d done a lot of work with the primary school in our village so I phoned them up. I’m good friends with the head teacher and I was like, would you mind having the trees and he was like, ‘Of course’. So we had a little ceremony with all the kids and they helped me plant the trees and just before I got there, obviously I had to introduce the idea to the children and I said to them, ‘Do you know who Paul O’Grady was?’ and bear in mind that all these children are seven, eight years old and the first answer was like, ‘He was a drag queen!’ which shows that for a child of seven to know who Lily Savage was, it really highlights his impact.”

Andre also revealed the reason he commemorated the one-year anniversary of Paul’s passing in New Zealand: “I didn’t want to be in the house, remembering the shock that I had gone through and it was really, really, really hard. I don’t wish for my worst enemy to find the person that you love unconscious on the floor. I didn’t want to remember him in that way, I wanted to celebrate his life, the time we had together. I was very fortunate to have spent eighteen years with him. When we got married, you know, for me it was forever and only, I didn’t realise that it was short lived. We were together for eighteen years and we were married for six.

“With Paul, we travelled all over the world but we’d never been to New Zealand. So, for me, it was going to a place where I could celebrate him, without the problems.... When someone dies, no one tells you how hard it is, with the admin of it and the decisions you have to make and all that cloudy that has nothing to do with how I felt about him.”

Andre added: “I took his passport with me, I took his pyjamas and do you know that I also took one of his friends with me, that’s an imaginary friend, called Kiddy!”