Billie Piper's Early Life
The daughter of a builder and a housewife, Billie Paul Piper was born on September 22, 1982, and brought up on a Swindon housing estate. She has three siblings - Elle, Harley and Charley, whom she often sang around the house with.
Her parents spotted their daughter's star potential early. Aged five she started dance classes and just two years later was filming soft-drink commercials for American TV. She even appeared as an extra alongside Madonna in Evita.
© Mike PriorAfter winning a scholarship to the prestigious Sylvia Young Theatre School in London whose alumni include Emma Bunton, Denise Van Outen and the Appleton sisters, she moved to London and lived with her aunt and uncle. "I was very emotional and homesick," she recalled in an interview with HELLO! in 1999. "I'd only just moved to a new secondary school and had gone through the stage of making all new friends. But I knew I wanted it so badly and if I didn't take the opportunity I'd regret it."
Billie Piper’s Big Break
Her big break came as she entered her teens when she was picked to star in a TV commercial for British pop music magazine, Smash Hits. All she had to do was run up to the camera, blow a pink bubblegum bubble and shout: "Pop!". It was probably something of an anticlimax after being on set with the Queen of Pop, but in retrospect, it was a career-defining moment.
© Brigitte EnglBillie Piper's Music Career
The head of Virgin's Innocent label saw her and signed her up without further ado. Because We Want To hit the Number One spot and, aged just 15, she became the youngest female to top the charts in almost 40 years. Her second single, Girlfriend, aced the UK Singles Chart. Billie took a year off after she had finished promoting her first album, Honey To The B, which adopted a double platinum and platinum certification as well as winning her four awards in 1999.
She bounced back onto the scene in the summer of 2000, raring to go with her new album, Walk of Life. She was rushed to hospital one night after she collapsed in a bar, sparking rumours of substance abuse and burn-out. She put it down to a recurring kidney infection and the heartache of splitting up with Ritchie Neville, of the boy band 5ive.
© Dave HoganAfter she appeared on the Pepsi Chart show in May 2000, the singer caught the eye of a vicious stalker who made morbid threats. Added to that, there was a marked cooling in her career, leading to rumours that the singer would be dumped by her record label.
She now recognises she suffered from depression and substance abuse at the height of her pop fame. "I had my head in the clouds, was mad, neurotic, destructive, a very different character to the one you see today," she later said in an interview with the Radio Times in 2006.
Billie Piper’s Personal Life
In December of the same year, she appeared on Chris Evans' radio show. The red-headed DJ was smitten, buying Billie a Ferrari even though she had yet to pass her driving test which he filled with long-stemmed roses, and telling his listeners that he had met the girl he was going to marry.
© Mike MarslandThe couple jetted off to Madeira to celebrate the new year before saying 'I do' in Las Vegas on May 6, 2001. She was 18 at the time and he was 34. "Chris and I found each other when it could have gone badly wrong for both of us, " she revealed. "And we saved each other from our worlds of madness."
Following her marriage Billie dropped off the scene somewhat, jet-setting with her new husband and maintaining a lower profile. By 2003 she was back, however, making a splash on British TV screens with a role in the highly acclaimed series of dramas Canterbury Tales, and going on to star as Hollywood heart-throb Orlando Bloom's love interest in 2004's The Calcium Kid.
As Billie's acting career began taking off, however, her marriage floundered. She and Chris split in 2004 - just before she landed a plum role alongside Christopher Eccleston on TV's Doctor Who. Her performance on the show won her several awards, including Best Actress and Rising British Talent. The couple filed for divorce in 2006 but Billie insisted she would not seek a share of her former husband's millions, and she still describes Chris as her "best friend".
Billie has since found love with fellow actor Laurence Fox, a member of the famous British thespian dynasty. They wed in an intimate ceremony on New Year's Eve of 2007. Less than a year later on October 21, 2008 the Foxes celebrated the birth of a son, whom they named Winston James.
© Photo: Getty ImagesThey later had a second child, Eugene Pip, who was born in 2012, but eventually announced their divorce after 8 years of marriage in 2016, when Billie met her new beau Johnny Lloyd. In 2019, one of Britain’s favoured actresses gave birth to Tallulah with her new boyfriend, a former rockstar who performed with his indie band Tribes from 2010-2013.
Billie Piper's Recent Successes
Named most popular actress at the National Television Awards in 2006, it was clear that Billie had made her comeback in 2009. In June of that year she announced that she would be leaving Doctor Who, where she won legions of fans as the Timelord's sidekick Rose Tyler, at the end of season two. In 2007, she released her autobiography Growing Pains, which amassed raving reviews and fans were ecstatic to read more about her life, trials and tribulations.
Job offers immediately came through and she was cast as the female lead in a TV adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, won the role of Victorian heroine Sally Lockhart in BBC drama Ruby And The Smoke, and established herself as one of the nation's best-loved actresses playing Belle de Jour in hit ITV show The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl.
© Photo: RexBillie would later play the role of Her in theatre play Yerma, which saw her becoming the only actor in British theatre history to win all six UK theatre ‘Best Actress’ awards available for a single performance. However, more recently, Billie’s directorial debut UK screens in May 2021 with her film Rare Beasts, starring Lily James, Leo Bill, David Thewlis and Kerry Fox.
Speaking with HELLO! in 2021, Billie revealed that the film's focus on modern love and modern feminism "was born out of a period of time where I was observing a lot of friends having this sort of experience and crisis and yet the messaging was, 'You can do it all, you can be super successful and have a really meaningful relationship with your kids, a passionate love affair with your partner,' and all I could see were people unravelling.
"I didn't see the success story of all of that and I just knew I wanted to talk honestly about what that actually looks like. So it comes from my late twenties and early thirties when I started to see that fallout."
Billie stole audiences' hearts once again in 2020 when she starred in I Hate Suzie, and its prequel I Hate Suzie Too, in 2022. The BAFTA-nominated show was co-created by Billie and Succession writer Lucy Prebble.
