Alan Fletcher claims his fame on 'Neighbours' took him to a "dark place".

Alan Fletcher was in a 'dark place'

Alan Fletcher was in a 'dark place'

The veteran actor has portrayed Dr. Karl Kennedy on the Australian soap - which is due to end this week - since 1994 and he admitted the early days of his success on the programme saw his ego get out of control, and he eventually sought therapy to become less "selfish" after his wife, Jennifer Hansen, urged him to get help.

He said: "I wasn’t a good person to be around. I became selfish and things became too much about me, me, me.

“I needed therapy to get through this dark period.

“My wife said to me: ‘You’re not in a good place, you require professional help’.”

Alan began to struggle when trying to juggle the demands of his filming schedule for the show with continuing his beloved photography business.

He added to The Sun newspaper: “I love photography so much and hadn’t wanted to let the business I’d built up go, even after I’d landed the Neighbours job but in the end, I completely blew myself out and needed assistance.

“I had to get a level playing field back in my life - I needed to take a breath and think a little bit about where I sat in the world, in order to achieve some proportion.

Alan recently admitted it was "very hard" not to cry when he filmed the final scenes for 'Neighbours'.

He said: "It was very hard to fight back tears as we were saying the dialogue for what was going to be the last moments of the show.

"There were hundreds of people in the studio to watch that final piece of filming. We had some speeches, I said a few words. There were some tears. There were some celebrations."

'Neighbours' final episode will air in the UK on 29 July on Channel 5.

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