Amanda Holden has confessed she tricked her husband into having their daughter Hollie.

The 'Britain's Got Talent' judge secretly stopped taking her contraceptive pill in order to conceive her 21-month-old daughter Hollie with her husband Chris Hughes, but insists it was the right thing to do because it helped them deal with the grief of suffering a miscarriage in 2010 and the birth of their stillborn son Theo the following year.

In an interview with the new UK issue of OK! magazine, she said: ''I'll be honest, what I did was devious. But it was the only way I could think to stop something bad happening - having to go somewhere, away from my family and being looked after by proper people [in a psychiatric institution.] That was not going to happen to me. I've always been a fixer, and I knew what would fix it.

''Obviously I was never going to replace my son. I think about him every day. But I had to have another baby. I know I may get criticism, but it was about survival. ''

Amanda, 42, delivered Theo when was seven months pregnant and her husband Chris - with whom she also has seven-year-old daughter Lexi - had advised her to wait before trying for another child but he was overjoyed once he learned of her pregnancy.

She recalled: ''He was shocked. I don't think he could get his head round it. But afterwards he said, 'I'm so glad you did it.' ''

Amanda - who almost died due to complications during the birth of Hollie - knows she made the right choice to get pregnant and insists she had to because she didn't have time to waste.

She said: ''We'd already made the choice to have another baby, but he wanted to give it time, until after I'd done 'Shrek' [the musical]. Men don't understand. The clock ticks, my eggs were going to shrink into raisins, so we needed to move on with it.''