Lily Rose Beatrice Allen (born 2 May 1985) is an English singer-songwriter and actress. 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. 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.

Allen was born on 2 May 1985 in Hammersmith, West London, the daughter of Keith Allen, a Welsh-born actor, and British film producer Alison Owen. She has an older sister, Sarah; a younger brother, actor Alfie (subject of her song “Alfie”); and a younger sister, Rebecca. Lily Allen’s mother was from a devoutly Catholic working-class Portsmouth family, and was 17 when she gave birth to Sarah. Allen is the goddaughter of Wild Colonials vocalist Angela McCluskey and 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 while 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, the Independent Hill House School, Millfield, 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 Allen 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 at age 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.”

When her family went to Ibiza on holiday, Allen told her mother that she was staying with friends but remained in Sant Antoni de Portmany instead. She earned money by working at a Plastic Fantastic record store and dealing ecstasy at the age of 15. Allen met her first manager, George Lamb in Ibiza. She first recorded the vocals for “On Me Head Not Off Me Head” written by her father for Mike Bassett: England Manager in 2001, and was featured in the 2002 song by her father’s group Fat Les, “Who Invented Fish and Chips”. She started to work with music producers, and recorded a demo. She was rejected by several labels, which she attributed to her drinking and being the daughter of Keith Allen. She eventually used her father’s connections to get signed to London Records in 2002. When the executive who had signed her left, the label lost interest and she left without releasing the folk songs[which?] many of which were written by her father. She then studied horticulture to become a florist, but changed her mind and returned to music. Allen began writing songs, while her manager introduced her to production duo Future Cut in 2004. They worked in a small studio in the basement of an office building.