Jolene Anderson still "upset" at Mark Priestley's suicide

Jolene Anderson has revealed that she was devastated when her friend Mark Priestley died.

The Australian actress, who played Priestley's on-screen wife in All Saints, said that she "couldn't talk" about him for years and experienced health problems after he committed suicide in 2008.

Anderson told National Features: "There are some things you can deal with and some you can't - they become part of you. I couldn't talk about it for years. I just went, 'I don't want to talk about it.'

"I remember doing the musical Tell Me on Sunday in Melbourne a week after [Mark] died. I was on stage and there was a scene where I cry and he popped into my head. I fell down on the stage sobbing and there were 600 people looking at me and I thought, 'Could someone just peel me off the stage?' I was so upset.

"There was a day when I was on the set of [police drama] Rush and I just started crying when I was rehearsing a scene with Rodger [Corser]. He said, 'Are you all right, do you want to have a half-hour break?' and I'm like, 'No, it will pass.'

"There are some things in life that shouldn't happen. Something like that... I think about how his family must feel. I still can't listen to the soundtrack of Tell Me on Sunday. I keep that one bottled."

Anderson recently revealed that she felt very "vulnerable" after filming recent scenes in Rush where her character deals with the aftermath of a rape.