‘Frightening me’: Health crisis Debra Lawrance kept secret

Former Home and Away star Debra Lawrance has shared details of a secret health crisis she endured during performances for the first time – revealing the surprising cause behind her ordeal.

The beloved Australian actress, who portrayed the iconic Pippa Ross on the hit channel seven show for more than eight years, opened up about the struggle she went through as she came to the end of her four-year stint playing Professor Minerva McGonagall in the stage production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

The production ran in Melbourne from 2019 to 2023, and Debra told Sam Frost and Sarah Roberts’ Cracking On podcast that towards the end of her stint on the show she felt herself getting “weaker and weaker” leading to a situation where “being on stage was frightening me”.

At the time, Debra, now 69, had to perform in scenes on top of a train which required a lot of vocal energy and spatial referencing, and she found she was losing her balance.

“So I was in a bad place physically, which then frightened the crap out of me,” the star admitted.

“I had a series of panic attacks about going on stage because I didn’t feel connected to my body. 

“That was pretty terrifying. It created a lot of anxiety for me.”

Debra – who is married to her former Home and Away co-star Dennis Coard – shared how she later discovered the surprise cause of the health issue she was experiencing.

“I got really, really sick and it turned out to be mercury toxicity, because I was eating too much fish – canned fish and fresh fish,” the star revealed, adding that she had eaten fish as her “protein for years and years”.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand advises that there are many nutritional benefits from eating fish as part of a balanced diet.

“Mercury occurs naturally in the environment and builds up in fish over time. All fish contain some mercury with most fish having low levels,” the agency writes online.

“Only a few species have higher amounts. The amount of mercury depends on the age of a fish, the environment in which it lives and what it eats.”

The NSW Food Authority states that it’s generally safe for all population groups, including pregnant women, to eat two to three servings of any type of tuna or salmon a week, whether it’s canned or fresh.

“Canned tuna usually has lower mercury levels than other tuna because tuna used for canning are smaller species that are caught when less than one year old,” the authority writes.

Debra is not the first celebrity to speak out about how a diet too high in fish impacted their health.

In 2020 former Take That star Robbie Williams revealed how he “could have died” from his diet choices back in 2017, if his wife Ayda Field hadn’t insisted he go for tests.

 “I ate fish twice a day and when I finally went to the doctor to get examined and we had the test results, he told me I had the highest mercury poisoning he had ever seen,” the star told Radio X.

“They really did the mercury test because my wife is very neurotic and does all kinds of tests all the time. I can only thank God because I could have died from mercury and arsenic poisoning,”