Actress Demi Isaac Oviawe has opened up about her late parents following her elimination from Dancing with the Stars this weekend.
The Cork star was eliminated from the show last night after being in the bottom two with Fred Cooke.
Demi was visibly upset after being voted out, something she says rarely happens.
“People who know me know I don’t cry. So for me to cry on the show showed that there was a lot going on that people don’t know about. So when I did the song for my dad it was the toughest. The emotion of it was so hard.
Opening up about her dad, who passed away when she was just fifteen, she said he was her support system.
“My dad’s name was Joe. He is my rock, he is my sun. He’s the person I’d go to if I had a problem, he’d bend over backwards to make sure you’re okay. If you needed something today he would do everything he could to do it for you. That was just my dad.
“For him to die was probably the hardest moment of my life. When you have four younger brothers, a newborn in the house, it’s tough. You just have to be strong,” she said.
It’s not the only heartache the 18-year-old Leaving Cert student has endured, as she also lost her mother when she was a young child.
“I was five [when my mum died]. My auntie died a few months later and there’s a whirlwind of stuff.
Speaking of dealing with the death of her dad, she said: “I wasn’t sad at the time, just really angry. So they [the school] advised me to go to counselling. From there they pointed out where the anger was coming from, just to mask my sadness.”
“People going through what I went through or even worse should seek help because it’s the only way to cope with it,” she told Ryan Tubridy.
The Young Offenders star lives with her four younger brothers and her stepmother, her father’s former partner, and her father’s brother, Courage.
