Actress and TV presenter Kym Marsh quit smoking for her family – not only to stay healthy for her children and grandchildren, but also because of her own father’s health scare.

Having smoked on and off for 25 years since her late teens, Marsh successfully quit a few years ago after her father, a heavy smoker, suffered a cardiac arrest at 49 – an age she herself is nearing.

Now, she’s using her experience to encourage others to do the same in an NHS film for No Smoking Day (March 12), aiming to inspire some of the nation’s six million smokers to kick the habit.

“The final turning point was my grandchildren really, and obviously my kids,” she says. “I think it was becoming a grandparent, and realising I’m still fairly young to be a grandparent and I’ve got the opportunity of doing some really amazing, adventurous things with them and I don’t want to cut that short.

“I knew that I shouldn’t be smoking, because my dad had a massive cardiac arrest when he was 49, and thankfully recovered and we got him for many more years, but that was all down to the fact that he was a very, very heavy smoker.

“And I just thought  ‘Come on Kym, this should be the time when you look at your life and go, I want to be around’.

“I’m not going to let something like what happened to my dad take me away from my grandchildren and my kids.”

Marsh, 48, who played Michelle Connor in Coronation Street for 13 years and now presents BBC One’s Morning Live with Gethin Jones, admits that giving up cigarettes was tough.

Describing herself then as a “social smoker”, she says: “It’s not an easy journey.  For me, it was the social aspect of it – I found that quite hard. It was difficult going out and being in environments with people who enjoyed smoking. It was quite a hard cycle to break.”

She says she took advice and support from her GP, and was helped by the NHS Stoptober annual stop smoking campaign.

“That was good,” she says. “For me, it was about trying to break that cycle of weekends and being out with my friends, choosing places that we went to that made it more difficult for smoking to be accessible, or being with people who didn’t smoke.

“I just tried to remove myself from those situations as much as possible, until I got to the point where I felt that I didn’t miss it any more.”

Marsh, who has two grown-up children, David and Emilie, and a younger daughter Polly, aged 12, and three grandchildren – Polly, aged eight, Teddy, five, and Clayton, two, admits she had a few smoking “wobbles on and off over the years”, but proudly declares: “I’ve not had that craving for a long time now, and I think eventually it does go away.”

She says that when she smoked she used to think her hair and clothes stank, so not only was she pleased that she no longer smelt of cigarettes, but she noticed her sense of taste and smell improved.

And although some smokers worry about putting on weight if they quit as they grab for sweets and junk food to make up for the lack of a cigarette in their hand, Marsh happily reports that never happened to her because she replaced fags with fitness.

“I combined it with a whole health and fitness thing,” she says. “As I’m getting older, I’m getting more and more aware of my health, and trying to take care of myself a lot more, and I combined all of that with quitting to have a healthy mindset.

“I used distraction as part of my quitting journey, so I would choose something like going to the gym or going for a run – trying to replace bad things with good is always a really good tip.

“Once you make that decision that you want to quit, it’s about trying to find healthy activities or healthy things to replace smoking. Distraction is always a good one, and if you can get into going to the gym or even going for a walk, things like that, just  to take your mind off it, I think the cravings pass quicker if you’ve got something to occupy yourself.”

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Marsh did a lot of running, completing 10k runs for charity, although she says she can’t run as much now because she’s got knee problems. “I’ve loved running so much over the last few years, and I think my general health and ability to sustain those kinds of running events was made a lot easier after quitting, because you find you can breathe better,” she says.

“There’s nothing worse after having been out and smoking than waking up the next day feeling like something’s crushing your chest, because that’s the only way I could describe it. It was like I could feel the congestion, if that sounds not too gross. And I’d have a cough intermittently, and I’d clear my throat quite a lot. That was made a lot better once I finally properly kicked it.”

Marsh stresses that there’s so much help available to help smokers quit these days, and says: “The message is it’s National No Smoking Day and we want to encourage the six million smokers to attempt to make that step to quitting. And the key word is attempt, because you’ve got to keep trying, and it’s not going to be easy.

“There may be times when people have a wobble, and you can’t beat yourself up for that, but get back on the horse. It’s a tough journey, but you can do it.”

And she adds: “We need to think about what we want from our life and what we want for our future. And when I look at my kids and I look at my grandchildren, they’re very much my future. My kids and my grandkids are my everything, and I want to be there for them.

“I want to see my grandchildren get married, I want to have great-grandchildren, and I want to be there to see it. I want to be able to enjoy it and play with them and run with them, and have that kind of life, and that’s why I’ve chosen not to smoke.”

Kym Marsh has joined forces with the NHS to encourage the UK’s six million smokers to quit smoking this No Smoking Day (March 12). For help and support download the free NHS Quit Smoking app