Lily Allen, English singer-songwriter and actress
Lily Rose Beatrice Allen (born 2 May 1985) is an English singer, songwriter, actress and author. She is the daughter of actor Keith Allen and film producer Alison Owen. Her music career began in 2005 when she made some of her vocal recordings public on Myspace and the publicity resulted in airplay on BBC Radio 1 and a contract with Regal Recordings. Her first mainstream single, "Smile", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart in July 2006. Her debut record, Alright, Still, was well received, selling over 2.6 million copies worldwide and bringing Allen nominations at the Grammy Awards, the Brit Awards, and the MTV Video Music Awards.
In 2009, her second studio album—It's Not Me, It's You—saw a genre shift, having more of an electropop feel, rather than the ska and reggae influences of the first one. The album debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and the Australian ARIA Charts and was well received by critics, noting the singer's musical evolution and maturity. It spawned the hit 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. She has released two further albums: Sheezus (2014), which debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, and No Shame (2018) debuting at number eight.
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. Allen has since resumed her screen acting career from 1998; she 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.