he last time Belinda Lee
graced an 8 DAYS cover
was for our Olympics issue
in 2004 for what was a
back-breaking shoot that saw
the actress contorting herself
like a pretzel to fit into these
pages. In 2017, she’s posing
with fresh fruit. And in these 13
years, everything yet nothing
has changed.
Since that action-packed cover, the 39-year-
old’s life has seen more obstacles, drama and
tears than at the Olympics. In 2012, she went
through a very public “divorce” (that’s what she
calls her break-up with her fiancé after a six-year-
long courtship); last year, she lost her mum to
cancer. In between all that, she spent a chunk
of the last decade trotting around the globe for
hosting gigs where near-death experiences are
but the norm. Clear-lee, Belinda’s life has been a
white-knuckle rollercoaster ride.
But some things stay the same. Belinda’s
still her same wacky self, full of zest and
more animated than a Pixar movie. This is
apparent during this cover shoot at organic mart
SuperNature. She’s clad in an elegant dress,
leaning against a fresh fruit counter. She strikes
a sultry pose, lips slightly parted and there’s
a come-hither look in her eyes. Suddenly, she
bends forward and scratches her thigh. “Sorry,
itchy! I know this is very unglam,” she quips.
She collapses into peals of laughter — the loud,
robust let-loose kind — that rips forth every
so often in between shots. Which brings us to
the other thing that remains unchanging about
Belinda: Her one-of-a-kind laughter. As Mark Lee
once said, she sounds like a dinosaur when she
laughs. (Wait till you hear her sneeze.) Later, as
she scans through the photos, she jokingly asks
the photographer: “Never capture this one ah?”
and mimics her leg scratch. Her devil-may-care
’tude means she doesn’t always upkeep that
glossy celebrity veneer — and that may affront
some sensibilities. That fact isn’t lost on Belinda.
“I’m so goofy — I completely have no image.
I laugh like a monster. I’ve got no qualms with
showing my not-so-glam side. But it seems that
the public and the sponsors are not so forgiving,”
she admits. “So it has come to a point where
I have to curate a lot of the things that I do,
especially on my social media.”Thankfully, she’s her usual #nofilter self at
today’s interview. The result? A Q&A more revealing
than Nicki Minaj’s outfits. “I’m an open book. What
you see is what you get. I wear my heart on my
sleeves,” she says. True enough, as she recounts
her mum’s battle with breast cancer — she passed
away early last year at 66 — the waterworks begin.
“She was my pillar of strength. So losing her to
cancer was life-changing,” she confesses. So
uninhibited is the straight-shooter that almost no
topic is off-limits. Almost. When we probe further
about her highly publicised break-up with her
former fiancé, who got hitched to a local fashion
entrepreneur earlier this year, she turns reticent.
Even then, she does let loose some strong words,
pausing briefly to compose herself, as though the
wounds are still fresh and gaping.
But, you know what they say, there’s no
education like adversity. And Belinda is well
schooled in triumphing over setbacks. Everything
from the fiancé who got away to her decades-long
battle with depression and losing her loved one,
Belinda has successfully navigated through it all
and is #winning at life. A lesser being would have
thrown a pity party, or several. Instead, she turned
her sob story into a smashing success story. If life
was an Olympic 100m sprint, this girl’s got a gold
medal — or should we say mettle — to show for it.
“I never allow any negativity to pull me down. I
always try to rise above all my obstacles and be the
best I can be,” she intones.
These days, she traipses around the world to
give motivational pep talks to the down and out.
The actress-host-over-achiever has also distilled
over a decade’s worth of her travels into her debut
motivational book Larger than Life: Celebrating The
Human Spirit, which she says “has pulled some
people from the brink of death. Young girls. People
in prison. After reading my book, they stopped
thinking about killing themselves.” In the acting
department, the actress is putting the pain of
losing her mum to breast cancer to good use in
Ch 5 drama BRA, where she plays a breast cancer
survivor. “I’m pretty much like a mouthpiece for my
mum and what she went through,” she says. Next
February, she will also reprise her hosting role in Ch
5 reality show RenovAID that helps needy families
makeover their homes. “When I was young, I
never had enough money to buy new uniforms so I
always looked shabby. And I didn’t eat well ’cos my
family wasn’t well-to-do. So when I do a show like
RenovAID, I know how [the beneficiaries] feel and I
cry with them.” So life may have hurled a crateful of
rotten lemons at her, but Belinda did what Beyoncé
did. “I turned them into sweet-tasting lemonade.”T
8 DAYS | 33