Oti Mabuse has joined the line-up for the upcoming season of I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! (Picture: ITV)
A few years after walking away from Strictly Come Dancing, Oti Mabuse is preparing to appear I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! 2024.
The latest season of the long-running ITV series returns to screens this month, with the line-up confirmed this week.
Coleen Rooney, Tulisa Contostavlos, Jane Moore, Danny Jones and Melvin Odoom are among the 10 celebrities who will be facing Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly’s grim bushtucker trials and battling it out to be crowned King or Queen of the Jungle.
Ahead of entering the jungle, Oti revealed she watched the show ‘religiously’ and now felt ‘up for the challenge’.
Although snakes are her ‘biggest fear’, she is anticipating being a ‘comfort mum’ in camp by ‘listening to stories, motivate and hopefully entertain everyone with a bit of dancing’.
The 34-year-old will be using her time in camp to catch up on sleep and make friendships with people she wouldn’t normally meet, but before we see her on screen again, here’s everything we know about Oti’s life away from the camera.
What do we know about Oti Mabuse’s upbringing?
The professional dancer grew up in South Africa (Picture: Anthony Harvey/ Shutterstock)
Her sister Motsi is a judge on Strictly Come Dancing (Picture: ITV)
Oti Mabuse was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1990, going on to study civil engineering before pursuing a career in professional ballroom dancing.
Her elder sister, Motsi Mabuse, is also a professional ballroom dancer and is a current judge on Strictly.
On an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2022, Oti explained how their mother Dudu missed out on pursuing her love for ballroom dancing due to growing up under apartheid.
So, when she had her own children, Dudu started her own dance school as ‘no one was teaching Black kids how to dance’ where they lived at the time.
Oti won the South African Latin American Championship eight times, after which she moved to Germany to broaden her dancing horizons.
What has Oti Mabuse done before appearing on I’m A Celebrity?
Oti joined the BBC dancing series in 2015 (Picture: Dave J Hogan/ Getty Images)
In 2015 Oti joined the German version of Strictly, Let’s Dance, where she appeared on two seasons in total.
That same year she joined Strictly, where she was paired with Olympic boxer Anthony Ogogo.
In subsequent years she competed with Danny Mac, Jonnie Peacock, Graeme Swann, Kelvin Fletcher and Bill Bayley, winning with the latter two.
She won the Mirrorball Trophy twice before leaving the show after the 2021 season (Picture: PA)
After competing with Ugo Monye in 2021, she revealed a few months after that season ended, she was leaving the series after seven years.
In recent years Oti has also been a judge on the now-defunct series The Greatest Dancer, been a contestant on Celebrity MasterChef, a panellist on The Masked Singer and a judge on Dancing on Ice.
This week she was also officially announced as a I’m A Celebrity campmate, which came after rumours she’d been cast and a source saying she was ‘hugely popular and well liked’.
Is Oti Mabuse married and does she have any kids?
She welcomed her first child, a daughter, with husband Marcus Iepure last year (Picture: Oti Mabuse/ Instagram)
In 2014, Oti married Romanian dancer Marius Iepure, whom she had met in Germany.
On Christmas Day last year, the couple announced the arrival of their first child, a daughter.
However, a few months later Oti shared she suffered from sepsis, while her daughter was born ‘very’ premature.
‘You see your child for two minutes and then they get taken away by a group of 10 midwives and doctors. That’s when things start to change and start to hit you,’ she recalled.
‘I think we didn’t hold her for about a week because she was still in an incubator with the wires, and with jaundice so she was under blue light. And she had infections because it turned out that I had sepsis,’ she added during an appearance on Giovanna Fletcher’s podcast Happy Mum Happy Baby.
After giving birth two months early, Oti and Marius announced the arrival of their daughter when she was nine weeks old.
Oti, who hasn’t revealed her baby’s name publicly, previously said they wanted to take ‘time for ourselves’ after the ‘big shock’ over her ‘unexpected’ premature birth.
I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here starts on Sunday, November 17, at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX.
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