Lily Allen

Lily Rose Beatrice Allen (born 2 May 1985) is an English singer, songwriter, and actress. Her accolades include a Brit Award as well as nominations for a Grammy Award and a Laurence Olivier Award.

Allen's musical career began in 2005 when she was signed to Regal Recordings and began publishing her vocal recordings on the social networking site Myspace. Their popularity resulted in airplay on BBC Radio 1. Her 2006 debut commercial single, "Smile", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart by July of that year and received double Platinum certification by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). Allen's debut studio album, Alright, Still (2006), was met with positive critical reception, peaked at number two on the UK Albums Chart, and sold over 2.6 million copies worldwide. The album also yielded a Grammy Award nomination for Best Alternative Music Album and spawned the follow-up singles "LDN" and "Alfie".

Her second studio album, It's Not Me, It's You (2009), debuted atop the UK Albums Chart and the Australian ARIA Charts, and spawned the singles "The Fear", "Not Fair" and "Fuck You". This success saw her receive the Brit Award for British Female Solo Artist at the 2010 Brit Awards. Allen and Amy Winehouse were credited with starting a process that led to the "year of the women" media label in 2009 that saw five female artists making music of "experimentalism and fearlessness" nominated for the Mercury Prize. Her third album, Sheezus (2014), peaked atop the UK Albums Chart once more, while her fourth album, No Shame (2018), peaked at number eight. Her fifth and most recent album, West End Girl (2025), peaked at number two and was met with broad critical acclaim.

Allen also ventured into other careers; in 2008, she hosted her own television talk show, Lily Allen and Friends, on BBC Three before launching her own record label, In the Name Of, in 2011. In 2018, Allen released her autobiographical book, My Thoughts Exactly. Her personal life, including an affair with Liam Gallagher and hiring female prostitutes, has attracted media attention. As an actress, Allen appeared in the 2019 film How to Build a Girl. In 2021, she made her West End debut in the new play 2:22 A Ghost Story, for which she received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress. She is a daughter of actor Keith Allen and film producer Alison Owen.

Allen was born on 2 May 1985 in Hammersmith, west London, to Keith Allen, a Welsh-born actor, and British film producer Alison Owen. She has an elder sister, Sarah; a younger brother, actor Alfie (subject of her song "Alfie"); and a younger sister, Rebecca. Alison Owen was from a devoutly Catholic working-class Portsmouth family, and was 17 when she gave birth to Sarah. Allen is the goddaughter of director Daniel Kleinman and Wild Colonials vocalist Angela McCluskey and a third cousin of singer Sam Smith.

At the age of three, Allen appeared in The Comic Strip Presents... episode "The Yob", which her father had co-written. When she was four, her father left the family. During her early childhood, Allen lived with her family on a council estate. They later settled in Islington. For that time, the family lived with comedian Harry Enfield whilst her mother dated him. The Clash singer and guitarist Joe Strummer was close to Allen.

Allen attended 13 schools, including King Charles III's junior alma mater Hill House School and Bedales School, and was expelled from several of them for drinking and smoking. When Allen was eleven, former University of Victoria music student Rachel Santesso overheard her singing "Wonderwall" by Oasis in the school's playground; impressed, Santesso, who later became an award-winning soprano and composer, called Allen into her office the next day and started giving her lunchtime singing lessons. This led to Allen singing "Baby Mine" from Disney's Dumbo at a school concert.

Allen told Loveline that the audience was "brought to tears at the sight of a troubled young girl doing something good". At that point Allen said she knew that music was something she needed to do either as a lifelong vocation or to get it out of her system. She played the piano to grade 5 standard and achieved grade 8 in singing. Allen also played violin, guitar and trumpet, and was a member of a chamber choir. Her first solo was "In the Bleak Midwinter". In 1998, Allen appeared in the music video to the Fat Les song "Vindaloo". She dropped out of school aged fifteen, not wanting to "spend a third of her life preparing to work for the next third of her life, to set herself up with a pension for the next third of her life."