Former The Weakest Link presenter Anne Robinson, who turns 81 today (Friday, September 26) has often spoken candidly about her health issues. She has talked about battling alcoholism in her early adult years to fighting skin cancer while she was presenting the popular BBC quiz show.

The TV host has certainly lived a colourful life. She has been married and divorced twice - first to journalist Charles Wilson and then to another journalist, John Penrose. Anne is currently in a relationship with Queen Camilla's ex-husband, Andrew Parker Bowles.

She worked for a number of national newspaper, including the Daily Mail, Sunday Times and Daily Mirror, but it was in front of the camera where she really blossomed.

As well as The Weakest Link, Anne also presented Points of View and Countdown to cement her status as a household name on British television, but her life has not been without its difficulties.

According to the presenter, her alcoholism became so bad that at one stage she claimed she "only had six weeks to live".

By her mid-30s (she quit drinking for good in December 1978 at the age of 34 and joined Alcoholics Anonymous soon afterwards) she thinks she was close to death. Speaking to the Daily Mail, she said: "By my mid-30s, I got to the point where I probably had about six weeks to live.

"I suffered from a really bad drink problem and my weight dropped down to about six stone. I woke up one day and realised I had a stark choice: did I want to live or die? I was seriously abusing my body."

She said at the time: "Luckily, I came to my sense just in time. That was almost 40 years ago and I haven't had a drop since."

Anne said a distressing incident with her daughter Emma convinced her to stop drinking for good. She stopped to pick her up from school and drove to a petrol station to buy a bottle of vodka, but seeing her daughter cry as she drank it persuaded her to join AA.

She lost a custody battle for Emma, then aged two, in 1973, as her ex-husband Charles Wilson was granted sole custody, care and control of her.

Anne received a huge health scare at the height of her The Weakest Link fame as a doctor found a mole on her back "by chance".

The mole, discovered in 2001, turned out to be skin cancer but she was able to receive treatment before it was too late. A decade after her cancer battle, Anne opened up about the ordeal in an interview with The Daily Mirror.

She said: "I'm so glad to be standing here now. I didn't even know I had cancer. It was by chance that a doctor in Los Angeles spotted a mole on my back."

Having the mole left a mark on her skin, but the presenter said: "It (the mole) had to be dug into twice before they got it out. I have a rather large scar on my back but it's a small price to pay.

"I was part of the generation that took sunbeds and didn't worry. It's only recently that people have known of the dangers."

Anne has admitted that she thinks about her own mortality "quite a lot", reading the obituaries in newspapers to look at the ages of the deceased.

She said: "And I look at the obituaries saying: 'Oh, golly, they went at 70, they went at 72.' But then the other day there was a woman who died at 116.

"So, what I do is I try to keep fit, and live in the day and be grateful for wonderful grandsons, my daughter and my son in law, although he supports Everton, but you can't have everything… And I love clothes. I keep buying clothes, I don't think, 'Oh, well, I won't need any soon.'"

The presenter has also spoken candidly about getting a facelift in 2004 - and people would still come up to ask her about it two decades later.

Speaking to The Oldie Magazine, the presenter said that 'for ages' strangers would come up to ask her who performed the £9,000 procedure.

She said: "For ages afterwards, men would come up to me and have a serious conversation and then at the end say: 'My wife wanted to know if I could ask you where you got your facelift.'"

Anne previously said she regretted not waiting longer before debuting her new face on TV.

She told Angela Scanlon's Ask Me Anything: "When you have cosmetic surgery it is a bit like taking a leg of lamb out of the oven. You have to let it rest for a bit.

"I went on television quite quickly afterwards and it was a famous headline which said, 'This face is the Weakest Link' as it was quite blown up."