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Simon Cowell says son Eric ‘saved him’ from ‘downward spiral’: I was ‘dying inside’
Stephanie Webber
June 11, 2024 at 12:11 AM
Simon Cowell says that his son “without question” saved him during a very difficult time following the death of his parents.
The “America’s Got Talent” judge opened up in-depth about his past on the latest episode of “The Diary of a CEO,” which was released June 10.
Cowell’s father Eric, who his son was named after, died in 1999, while his mother Julie died 16 years later. The former “American Idol” judge has 10-year-old son, Eric, with fiancée Lauren Silverman.
“I think particularly when I lost my mum, I was on a downward spiral at that point. I lost everyone, you know, I’ve lost my parents. It’s finality now. What I said about the material things I’ve got, everything just meant nothing at that point,” he said.
“I was desperately unhappy, I wasn’t particularly enjoying my work and I just thought you know what I’m just going to become a vampire then, and I would work through until 7 or 8 in the morning,” he continued. “I would wake up at 2 or 3 in the afternoon and I actually got addicted to that kind of lifestyle. I just loved the intensity. It was almost like because of the loss I’d had, I’ve got to find something else to fill it. And it was I’m just going to be a ridiculous workaholic, and I was very successful but I wasn’t happy, I really, really wasn’t happy.”
Cowell and Silverman began dating in 2004. Silverman was previously married to Cowell’s close friend Andrew Silverman, a real estate mogul in NYC.
Lauren called Cowell to reveal she was pregnant, and asked if he was “sitting down” first.
“You know what‘s coming next. It was like, ‘Are you sitting down?’ ‘Yes,’ ‘Well,’ and she told me. And yes it did absolutely change, it changed everything in my life. It made me happy again,” he recalled. “For me, it was perfect because like we were talking earlier about our childhoods, it was brilliant. Fantastic. I remember the first time I watched ‘Jungle Book’ [with him] and I’m looking over and seeing the joy he had watching that movie. It was like, oh my God I remember how I felt when I saw ‘The Jungle Book.’ “
Before Eric’s arrival, Cowell had “reached the point where nothing mattered.”
“Even to the point that I almost can’t remember everything from that period. It hit me so hard, the hardest thing also was being on television as well … I felt like a clown here because I’m dying inside,” he told podcast host Steven Bartlett. “And yet I’ve still got to do what I’m being paid to do as best as I could but I’d put on a ton of weight, I was eating junk, if I had got hit by a bus the following day, well, I’d be dead, but I wasn’t worried about anything like that.”
For Cowell, “the whole time was dark” when he was grieving the loss of his parents.
“I can absolutely relate to when people reach the lowest levels you possibly can, where essentially being alive doesn’t matter anymore, because you just go, ‘Well, what have I got to live for?’ ” he wondered. “Not thinking I want to take my own life, but thinking if something terrible happened it wouldn’t bother me, to myself.”
Last year, Cowell gushed about Eric during an interview with “Access Hollywood.”
“He’s like me. He likes being outside,” he said at the time. “He’s kind of doing all the things I did as a kid. He’s playing football outside, he’s climbing trees, he’s running … I’m happy.”
