Alison King, known for her role as Carla Connor on Coronation Street, has a life away from the cobbles that includes a past romance with a former co-star and a recent health battle. The actress joined the ITV soap in 2006 as the strong-willed owner of Underworld, and has since become a soap icon, involved in numerous dramatic storylines.
Romance with a Corrie Star
Alison had a five-year relationship with former Coronation Street star Philip Middlemiss, who played Des Barnes. They reportedly met at a Tenerife bar in March 1995. By November 1996, Philip told the Scottish Daily Record: "I've never been happier. She is a wonderful girl. I love her to death." However, by 2000, the pair had parted ways.
According to IMBD, Philip confessed: "I was in love with Allie. She's the only person I've ever really loved." He added, "But she was working in London and I was in Manchester. In another life, if I had been a bus driver and she had worked at the local baker's shop, we would have got married and had kids by now."
Engagement and Daughter
Alison was also previously engaged to Adam Huckett, a Coronation Street sound technician, with whom she shares her daughter Daisy, now 17. They never married and split in 2012. In 2009, Alison opened up about motherhood, telling Digital Spy: "Being a new mum runs over you like a steamroller at first. I was working quite hard up until the birth and then the birth resulted in an operation - I had to have an emergency C-section."
In November 2018, Alison was pictured with a new 'mystery man', who she revealed was IT consultant David Stuckley, nine years her junior, when they announced their engagement a year later. She told OK! magazine: "It was just a few days after our one-year anniversary. I had an inkling he was going to pop the question because he kept putting something on my finger and going, 'Right, close your eyes and forget this ever happened!'" But in May 2022 it was reported the pair had split after 'growing apart' during lockdown.
Surgery and Health Battle
Alison spoke about having dental surgery, which she underwent as a drama student due to self-consciousness about her teeth from thumb-sucking as a child. In 2015, she admitted to having more work done, telling dentistry.co.uk: "As an actress onscreen I'd begun to notice how my top and bottom front teeth had been pushed into the middle where my thumb had been."
Speaking about her secret health battle in a TikTok about working on the show, she said: "At the beginning of the year, my nervous system seemed to need rebalancing. I lost my mum last year, last August. And then at the beginning of this year, I got a chest infection from two of the gorgeous little babies at work. Actually, when we were filming the wedding, I had been coughing and coughing and coughing. My right lung was hurting, my chest was hurting anyway, it was sick of the coughing, it was inflamed."
Alison explained how she was struggling to breathe at times and couldn't even exercise. "Because of my nervous system and not doing anything, I was really struggling to breathe a full breath. I couldn't swim, which I do all the time because that's my therapy. I couldn't do anything," she said. Alison turned to reflexology and Reiki to help with her symptoms, and says she is feeling "good and happy". However, since getting the infection, she has experienced a twitch in her eye.
