Latest news with #Taggart
Edinburgh Live
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Live
Scottish star's life after quitting acting 30 years on from debut
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info Daniela Nardini, who became a household name as lawyer Anna Forbes in the 1996 BBC2 hit series This Life, is now barely recognisable from her days on screen. The actress, who also graced episodes of the Scottish crime drama Taggart, was close to quitting acting before securing her role in the acclaimed sitcom. This Life, which spanned 33 episodes and 11 years, followed a group of aspiring law graduates navigating their careers at a London law firm. The show enjoyed two successful series and a sequel TV movie in 2007 titled This Life +10. Daniela's portrayal of Anna won her a BAFTA at the age of 57, but she later chose to leave the limelight and now runs her own cognitive behavioural therapy practice in Glasgow. Her second BAFTA came in 2009 for her performance in the BBC Four drama New Town. Daniela's career also included roles in Vera, Waterloo Road, and The Fades, until she stepped back from acting in 2019, reports the Express. Pursuing a new direction, Daniela trained as a mental health professional, offering support to individuals dealing with depression, anxiety, behavioural issues, and those affected by cancer and addiction. Three decades after her breakout role, Daniela has transformed remarkably, embracing a fresh chapter in her life. In a Psychology Today profile, she reflects on her extensive acting career, stating: "I have worked as an actress for over 35 years. (Image: BBC) "This has been an invaluable education for me to study what it is to be human and how we can all suffer at times and feel misunderstood and lonely. "I myself have struggled at times. My practice involves helping you gain insight, clarity and believe it or not humour at times. I don't shock easily so I won't judge." Speaking with the Daily Mail in 2020, she shared her personal tribulations saying: " went through a very dark period. Sometimes I wonder if it was all the emotional stuff I was going through that caused my cancer.'" She added: "A couple of years down the road, I now feel as if I've emerged stronger and a better person, really. Anna would be proud."
Daily Record
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Taggart star looks unrecognisable 30 years after quitting acting
Daniela Nardini has undergone a huge transformation since her time on the show, as she's now quit acting altogether Daniela Nardini, who shot to fame as lawyer Anna Forbes in the 1996 BBC2 hit series This Life, is barely recognisable today. The actress, who also graced screens in the Scottish crime drama Taggart, was on the brink of abandoning her acting career before securing her role in the BBC2 sitcom. This Life, which spanned 33 episodes and 11 years, chronicled the lives of law graduates sharing a house while chasing their ambitions at a London law firm. The show enjoyed two successful series and was later followed by a sequel TV movie in 2007 titled This Life +10. Daniela, now aged 57, not only won a BAFTA for her portrayal of Anna but also claimed her second BAFTA in 2009 for her role in the drama New Town on BBC Four. Her other notable appearances include roles in Vera, Waterloo Road, and The Fades, before she took a step back from the spotlight in 2019. Pursuing a new direction, Daniela trained as a mental health professional and now runs her own cognitive behavioural therapy practice in Glasgow, aiding individuals with depression, anxiety, behavioural issues, and those coping with cancer and addiction. Three decades after her breakout role, Daniela has transformed remarkably, having embarked on a fresh journey in life, reports the Express. In a Psychology Today profile, she reflects: "I have worked as an actress for over 35 years. "This has been an invaluable education for me to study what it is to be human and how we can all suffer at times and feel misunderstood and lonely. "I myself have struggled at times. My practice involves helping you gain insight, clarity and believe it or not humour at times. I don't shock easily so I won't judge." Following "the worst five years of her life," which included her father's death in 2015, a cancer diagnosis in 2018, and a divorce, she chose to embark on this career path. Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2020, she revealed: "I went through a very dark period. Sometimes I wonder if it was all the emotional stuff I was going through that caused my cancer. "A couple of years down the road, I now feel as if I've emerged stronger and a better person, really. Anna would be proud."
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
The Scottish ‘tartan turf war' that went global
With a three-hour 'happy hour' and four big-screen TVs, Monaghans Bar in the Spanish resort of Fuengirola is a popular spot for those who like a night of soccer after a day of sun and sand. But on Saturday night, after drinkers watched the UEFA Champions League Final, a showdown of a less sporting sort unfolded outside. Just as the bar was emptying around 11.30pm, a car pulled up outside from which a black-clad gunman emerged. He shot dead the bar's Scottish owner, Ross Monaghan, and his Glaswegian friend Eddie Lyons Junior, before fleeing into the night. The double murder was the latest in a series of recent shootings on Spain's southern coast, long considered the 'Costa Del Crime'. Yet the hit may have been ordered from the rather less balmy climes of Glasgow, where a quarter-century feud between the city's two most powerful crime families is now spiralling out of control. In scenes that resemble an over-hyped episode of Taggart, the rival Lyons and Daniel gangs have been in open warfare for the past three months. Scores of homes and businesses, including garages, cab firms and beauty parlours, have been firebombed. Suspected associates have been attacked with machetes. Masked thugs behind the mayhem post videos of their handiwork online – shattering decades of painstaking PR in which Glasgow reinvented itself as a 'City of Culture'. The so-called 'tartan turf wars' are a throwback to the rougher Red Clydeside movement of the 1960s, when razor gangs terrorised the city. Today's Glasgow hard men, though, wield much deadlier weaponry than long-handled shaving blades, and their fiefdoms are no longer confined to council estates like Easterhouse. Attacks have taken place all over central Scotland, spreading to well-heeled districts of Edinburgh too. The feud reportedly dates back to the Lyons gang stealing a drug stash from the Daniels some 25 years ago, but onlookers fear it has become a battle to master the entirety of urban Scotland's lucrative drug trade. 'These groups have grown obscenely wealthy, preying on communities of very vulnerable people,' says MSP Russell Findlay, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, who says the government has been complacent about the rising threat of organised crime. 'These two individuals who were killed were prominent members of organised crime, and while it's still unclear who was behind their deaths, it seems they are paying the price for the lifestyle they led.' Mr Findlay is well-qualified to comment on the subject, having previously worked as an investigative crime reporter for Scottish TV and tabloid newspapers. In 2012, he wrote a book about the Daniel-Lyons feud, chronicling the misery it inflicted on Glasgow's Milton housing estate, the Lyons' original stronghold. The book's title, Caught in the Crossfire, was to prove horribly prophetic: three years later, Findlay himself was attacked on his doorstep by a knifeman who threw acid in his face. It was the kind of brazen intimidation more associated with Latin American narco-states – something that Scotland will come to resemble if more is not done, he warns. 'I remember thinking at the time: 'Why is nobody else saying enough is enough?'' he says. 'This is what happens when organised crime becomes too powerful: they try to take on mainstream society.' Spanish police have yet to identify the Fuengirola gunman, who some reports claim was a blonde-haired man presumed to be a fellow Scot. Scottish police, however, are likely to have no shortage of suspects already on their files. Both Monaghan, 43, and Lyons Junior, 46, were members of the Lyons gang, and no strangers to the art of the gangland hit themselves. Monaghan had been arrested then acquitted of the 2010 murder of Kevin 'Gerbil' Carroll, a notorious Daniel-gang enforcer. He then moved to Spain after being shot in the shoulder in Glasgow in 2017. He and Lyons Junior both also stood trial for attacking three men outside a bar in Dunbartonshire in 2016, the case only collapsing when the alleged victims claimed they had no memory of what happened. Indeed, those caught up in Lyons-Daniel violence have a marked tendency to 'forget' their testimony, much to the frustration of police. One incident that neither gang ever seems to have forgotten, though, is the theft of £20,000 worth of cocaine back in 2001 from a Daniel safe house. Nicknamed 'Morningside Speed' in honour of the posh Edinburgh suburb of the same name, cocaine was then relatively new to Scotland. Previously, heroin had been the drug of choice on impoverished housing estates – courtesy of smugglers like Jamie Daniel, the Daniel-gang founder, who flooded Glasgow with it in the early Eighties. Cocaine, though, was far more lucrative, and the theft of the stash, while relatively small in value, sparked a wider turf war over dealing patches. Escalating the violence was Carroll, who had allegedly been bullied by the Lyons' family during his schooldays, and was now a senior enforcer for the Daniel gang. He was infamous for so-called 'alien abductions', where rivals would be kidnapped, tortured and then dumped semi-naked on the street, too traumatised (or too terrified) to say what had happened to them. Not content with inflicting physical harm, he also vandalised a gravestone for Eddie Lyon Junior's younger brother, Garry, who died from leukaemia aged eight in 1991. Perceived as an outrage even by gangland standards, that act led to Carroll himself being shot dead in an Asda car park in Glasgow in 2010, in full view of horrified shoppers. So reviled was Carroll that police had nearly 100 potential suspects for his murder, and his death might have drawn a line under the feud. But it flared up again in 2016 when Jamie Daniel passed away from cancer – one of the few gang kingpins to die peacefully. His death left a power vacuum, which the Lyons' clan tried to exploit through five attempted murders in just five months. In one particularly savage case, Stephen 'Bonzo' Daniel was hunted down after a 100mph car chase through north Glasgow, before having his face macheted so badly that paramedics thought at first that he had been shot. 'His nose was hanging off on the left hand side near his ear', a policeman told a later trial of six Lyons associates, who were convicted of the five murder plots in 2019. Jailing them for a total of 104 years, a judge told them: 'You sought to turn Glasgow into a war zone for your feud. This is a civilised city, based on the rule of law.' With the violence now flaring up again, many Scots might well doubt that – not least those living in the streets where properties have been firebombed. While the gang kingpins often live in fortress-like mansions, equipped with CCTV, safe rooms and anti-ram-raid bollards, their footsoldiers often live on suburban estates. The precise spark for the latest hostilities remains unknown, although some believe it may be linked to the gangs' growing links to international drug cartels. The Lyons gang is said to have forged close links to Ireland's feared Kinahan cocaine cartel, whose senior members holed up in Dubai after pressure from the Dublin authorities. One Lyons family member has also lived in Dubai since an attempt on his life in Glasgow in 2006, and is said to have formed a 'Celtic cartel' with his Irish counterparts, whereby Lyons street dealers distribute Kinahan-supplied cocaine. Scottish police have already arrested at least 40 people over the feud, while Angela Constance, the SNP Justice Secretary, insisted that law-abiding Scots had nothing to fear. 'Scotland continues to be a safe place to live, with recorded crime down 40 per cent since 2006/07,' she said last month. Critics, however, complain the police service remains underfunded. For Findlay, the problems go even deeper. Far too much of Scotland's establishment, he says, has given the gangs the benefit of the doubt – from the Edinburgh professionals who act as their defence lawyers and accountants, to Left-leaning politicians who see them as victims of social injustice. He remembers how, in the mid-Nineties, Eddie Lyons Senior was given use of a former school in Milton for a 'community project', despite already being well-known to police. Objections, Findlay says, were overlooked by councillors who naively regarded Lyons Senior as a community activist. The centre was later shut down amid complaints it had become a gang hub. But Findlay cites multiple other examples where gangs are still flexing their muscles. In South Lanarkshire, a fellow Tory councillor, Graeme Campbell, quit his role after rows over planning issues led to gangsters attacking his house three times. And at jails across the country, prison officers' cars have been firebombed at least a dozen times. 'You've got attacks on journalists, councillors, prison officers: Scotland's isn't a narco-state, but this is how these things start. And, too often, the SNP's ethos has been to justify and explain, not to punish and deter – it is a social work mentality. The gangs must be rubbing their hands with glee,' he said. Meanwhile, in Spain, there are fears that violence could escalate further and Ana Mula, the mayor of Fuengirola, is calling for more resources to combat organised crime. She said: 'We live in a world and at a time where crime knows no borders. In places like the Costa del Sol, we're seeing developments that, as they spread, inevitable affect us. We need much greater involvement from the state on this issue.' Reports last month claimed the Lyons gang was seeking a truce in the feud. Given the recent events in Fuengirola that now seems unlikely. As Findlay points out, though, Saturday's shootings might not be connected to the Scottish feud at all, but rather the larger, global players that the Lyons gang is now part of. 'It could have been the work of their long-standing enemies in Scotland,' he said. 'But, out in Spain, they are swimming with much bigger sharks – who may be even more ruthless than they are.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
West Australian
04-06-2025
- General
- West Australian
Socceroos Alessandro Circati and Adam Taggart dreaming of World Cup qualification in hometown of Perth
When Socceroos defender Alessandro Circati began rehabilitation to repair his torn ACL last October, he was asked what his goals for recovery were. The WA-raised centre-back had a very specific date in mind: June 5, and a game against Japan in his hometown. 'They asked me, when you first get your surgery, first start your rehab, 'what's your goal? What are you trying to accomplish?'' Circati said. 'I said there was a World Cup qualifier in Perth in June. My goal was to be able to go there.' After a rapid six-and-a-half month recovery, the 21-year-old has ticked that box ahead of the Socceroos' Thursday night blockbuster against Japan at Optus Stadium. Circati, along with fellow Sandgropers Adam Taggart and Cameron Burgess, will be in contention to start against Japan. The feeling between Circati and Taggart, knowing a win would all but propel Australia to a sixth successive World Cup, is one of shared pride at potentially being able to clinch qualification in Perth. 'That's the cream of the crop, that's the dream,' Circati said. 'It's things you don't even dream of because they're so rare. But now I've got the opportunity, and I'm going to try take it in two hands.' 'It's almost surreal to have the opportunity to do it here in Perth, not only for myself personally, but for the city and all the people I care about,' Perth Glory skipper Taggart said. 'Everyone knows the John Aloisi penalty and it's replayed over and over. I was trying to explain to my mum the other day, the game is a similar situation to that. 'To be able to have the chance to create something special, like the Aloisi penalty or the Josh Kennedy header (in 2013), to have the chance to do it here in Perth is massive and really special.' Circati even being involved in camp is something of a surprise after he tore his ACL at the end of September during training with Serie A club side Parma. Stunningly, he was back on the bench less than seven months later and played a full 90 minutes in their final two games of the year, including a 0-0 draw with eventual champions Napoli. Circati said he began rehabilitation within three days of his operation and it was full systems go from there. 'I had surgery, went into rehab, was there for five-and-a-half months. After five-and-a-half months, I was sent back to the club and slowly started to train with the team, doing minimal things at the start, slowly and gradually moving into a full session,' he said. '(At) about six-and-a-half months, I was training fully and started on the bench. 'I was doing rehab six hours a day, only had Sunday off, so it was was full on. I didn't have much free time, I don't think I had a single day off other than the break for Christmas and New Year. 'It was 9-12 in the morning, go home, have lunch, be back at 2pm and go to 5, 5.30pm. 'When I play, I forget about my knee completely. It's not an issue for me.' The last time Circati played in Perth, he was playing for Glory's NPL team; Glory's A-League Men's skipper Taggart plays in Perth every other week, but his only national team appearance in his hometown came last year against Palestine at HBF Park. Taggart said the Palestine game was one of the most memorable of his career, but a step towards World Cup qualification and a goal against Japan would probably top it. 'Knowing what's on the line and being able to have the opportunity to do it here in Perth, which isn't something that comes around too often, is something that obviously we all want to make the most of,' he said. 'I'm really proud there's a few boys representing Perth, to play in the city and represent the people coming to watch the game tomorrow. It's massive for the city.'
Perth Now
04-06-2025
- General
- Perth Now
WA's Socceroos chase dream World Cup qualification in Perth
When Socceroos defender Alessandro Circati began rehabilitation to repair his torn ACL last October, he was asked what his goals for recovery were. The WA-raised centre-back had a very specific date in mind: June 5, and a game against Japan in his hometown. 'They asked me, when you first get your surgery, first start your rehab, 'what's your goal? What are you trying to accomplish?'' Circati said. 'I said there was a World Cup qualifier in Perth in June. My goal was to be able to go there.' After a rapid six-and-a-half month recovery, the 21-year-old has ticked that box ahead of the Socceroos' Thursday night blockbuster against Japan at Optus Stadium. Circati, along with fellow Sandgropers Adam Taggart and Cameron Burgess, will be in contention to start against Japan. The feeling between Circati and Taggart, knowing a win would all but propel Australia to a sixth successive World Cup, is one of shared pride at potentially being able to clinch qualification in Perth. 'That's the cream of the crop, that's the dream,' Circati said. 'It's things you don't even dream of because they're so rare. But now I've got the opportunity, and I'm going to try take it in two hands.' 'It's almost surreal to have the opportunity to do it here in Perth, not only for myself personally, but for the city and all the people I care about,' Perth Glory skipper Taggart said. 'Everyone knows the John Aloisi penalty and it's replayed over and over. I was trying to explain to my mum the other day, the game is a similar situation to that. 'To be able to have the chance to create something special, like the Aloisi penalty or the Josh Kennedy header (in 2013), to have the chance to do it here in Perth is massive and really special.' Circati, Burgess and Taggart are all WA products. Credit: Michael Wilson / The West Australian Circati even being involved in camp is something of a surprise after he tore his ACL at the end of September during training with Serie A club side Parma. Stunningly, he was back on the bench less than seven months later and played a full 90 minutes in their final two games of the year, including a 0-0 draw with eventual champions Napoli. Circati said he began rehabilitation within three days of his operation and it was full systems go from there. 'I had surgery, went into rehab, was there for five-and-a-half months. After five-and-a-half months, I was sent back to the club and slowly started to train with the team, doing minimal things at the start, slowly and gradually moving into a full session,' he said. '(At) about six-and-a-half months, I was training fully and started on the bench. Alessandro Circati takes a selfie for a supporter. Credit: Paul Kane / Getty Images 'I was doing rehab six hours a day, only had Sunday off, so it was was full on. I didn't have much free time, I don't think I had a single day off other than the break for Christmas and New Year. 'It was 9-12 in the morning, go home, have lunch, be back at 2pm and go to 5, 5.30pm. 'When I play, I forget about my knee completely. It's not an issue for me.' The last time Circati played in Perth, he was playing for Glory's NPL team; Glory's A-League Men's skipper Taggart plays in Perth every other week, but his only national team appearance in his hometown came last year against Palestine at HBF Park. Adam Taggart in Socceroos training session at HBF Park on June 2. Credit: Paul Kane / Getty Images Taggart said the Palestine game was one of the most memorable of his career, but a step towards World Cup qualification and a goal against Japan would probably top it. 'Knowing what's on the line and being able to have the opportunity to do it here in Perth, which isn't something that comes around too often, is something that obviously we all want to make the most of,' he said. 'I'm really proud there's a few boys representing Perth, to play in the city and represent the people coming to watch the game tomorrow. It's massive for the city.'
