Barbara Windsor moves into care home and husband admits he doesn't regret decision

Actress Dame Barbara Windsor has been moved into a care home full-time, after her Alzheimer's got worse during lockdown but her husband says the move is 'for the best'.

The former EastEnders actress, aged 82-years-old, left the home she shared with her husband in July to move into a care home in London.

Scott Mitchell, Dame Barbara’s husband of two decades, said he had acted on the advice of his wife’s neurologist.

'Deep down I know it's for the best but Barbara doesn't'

Describing the day he left Dame Barbara at the care home, Mr Mitchell told The Sun: "I'll never forget the feeling of emptiness. I felt sick in the pit of my stomach that I'd left her. I still feel like that.

"It's always been my biggest fear that one day I would have to take her somewhere and she'd be thinking: 'Why would he do this to me?’

"That fear has become a reality. It's something I never wanted.

“Deep down, I know it’s for the best, but Barbara doesn’t yet. I’m still trying to envisage when it becomes her normality and she will settle and be happy.

“But right now she still occasionally gets cross with me and wants to come home. But that’s the illness and, however painful it is for me to accept it, I don’t regret the decision.

"I know this needed to happen for Barbara’s wellbeing.”

Mr Mitchell said he had tried to make her room in the care home look homely with family and celebrity photographs.

After leaving Barbara Windsor at the care home, Mr Mitchell said: "By the time I got home and went to bed, I just felt desperately sad. It's been 27 years since we met and we spent so much of that time in each other's company. It feels like another chapter has gone."

The film and TV actress, who first appeared on stage at the age of 13, was made an MBE in 2000 and a dame in 2015 for services to drama.

Dame Barbara is most known for her role as pub landlady Peggy Mitchell in the BBC hit TV soap EastEnders and her part in Carry On films.

Her husband noticed she was forgetting her lines as early as 2006, and she stopped acting in EastEnders in 2016.

Dame Barbara's diagnosis was revealed publicly by her husband in 2018. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2014 and Mr Mitchell had been caring for her.

Last September, the couple delivered a petition to Downing Street signed by 100,000 people, requesting better support for people with Alzheimer's.

Dame Barbara Windsor met Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a meeting backed by the charity the Alzheimer's Society, to highlight concerns over dementia care.

'Emotional rollercoaster'

In January, her husband said the TV star was forgetting who he is, regularly asked for her deceased mum Rose and at times thought she was living in her parents’ house.

Last May, it was reported the UK’s lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic had proved difficult for the star.

Her friend Christopher Biggins told The Sun, said: "She’s used to having a lot of visitors but now she’s asking why people have stopped coming to see her.

"It’s not because she thinks 'they don’t like me' because her husband Scott explains to her but she just forgets the explanation and she asks all the time."

While Mr Mitchell does not regret the decision to move her into a care home, he says of his life at home without his wife: “I feel I'm on an emotional rollercoaster.

"I walk around, trying to keep busy, then burst into tears. It feels like a bereavement.”

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