Copyright hellomagazine
Tess Daly has been hosting Strictly Come Dancing since 2004, so her joint announcement earlier this week with Claudia Winkleman that the pair would be leaving the show came as a complete shock to fans of the series. However, a more surprising piece of information has emerged about the 56-year-old presenter, and has been quickly amassing viral attention over the past few days: her real name is not, in fact, Tess Daly. Scroll down to find out her real name, and why she decided to change it… The Strictly presenter's birth name is actually Helen Elizabeth Daly, and she has explained in the past why she changed her name for her career. Speaking to the Mail Weekend magazine, she explained that, when she started in the modelling business at 18, there was already a model with the name 'Helen Davies', and her agent believed it was too similar. So, where did Tess come from? Her agent was obsessed with German actress and model Nastassja Kinski, who was in the film Tess, an epic romantic drama directed by controversial Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski. "My agent [...] thought I looked like her," she told the publication, "so Tess it was. I was gullible and impressionable." It wasn't long before her career began to skyrocket: "Mind you, two weeks later I was in Japan and then travelled the world," Tess shared. "Paris, Milan, New York." Despite a sacrifice that wasn't exactly her choice, it seemed that the young model managed to take off very soon afterwards – however, her real name hasn't completely disappeared from her life. Though she's now been known as 'Tess' for twice as long as she had been 'Helen', on her passport, Tess is still Helen Daly and there is still one person who calls her by her real name. "My mum's really the only person who still calls me Helen, and that's not often," Tess told the magazine. "She tends to call me 'love', so when she does say 'Helen' it can take me a while to respond." Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman's departure On Thursday, the two Strictly hosts released a joint announcement to social media confirming that they would be leaving the show. In a video shared to Instagram, Tess said: "After 21 wonderful years on Strictly, we have decided that the time is right to step aside and pass over the baton. We have loved working as a duo and hosting Strictly has been an absolute dream. We were always going to leave together and now feels like the right time." You can read, and watch, their full statement here.
