The 'Smile' hitmaker is 'done being at the forefront' after suffering from multiple traumatic experiences that included a sexual assault and pregnancy loss.
- May 19, 2023
AceShowbiz - Lily Allen hasn't been able to "reconnect" with herself after multiple traumas including the stillbirth of her son. The "Smile" hitmaker and then-husband Sam Cooper tragically lost their third child in 2010 when she was six months pregnant and, five years later, a man was convicted and detained under the Mental Health Act after he broke into her house while she and daughters Ethel and Marnie were sleeping, and she admitted the incidents have all made her take a step back from music.
"People may think I'm retreating, but I'm done being at the forefront. There was the stillbirth of my son, the stalking incident, the sexual assault - I felt myself leave my body when they happened, and I don't think I've ever managed to reconnect," Lily - who detailed in her 2018 memoir that she had been assaulted by a music industry figure - told HUNGER magazine.
The 38-year-old star - who is now married to David Harbour and has Ethel, 11, and Marnie, 10, with Sam - has moved into acting in recent years but she hasn't ruled out a return to music one day in the future.
She said, "Theatre and playing to big crowds gets the adrenaline going … I'm like 'oh I'm f****** alive again' - it's addictive. I feel like I have done everything I wanted to do in terms of my career, and I do feel like I won at being a musician, but that being said, I can't just be making packed lunches and ferrying kids to activities forever."
"I'll do it for a few months and then I'll have to stick my teeth into something - plus I think it's healthy for them to see me doing something else. I'm not saying I'm never gonna make music again. But with acting, especially theatre, something truthful happens in the moment, and when I write music, I'm thinking about how people are going to receive it."
The "Dreamland" actress thinks her daughters will be "really cross" when they finally find out about her old hard-partying ways. She said, "Ethel was seven, Marnie was six when I got clean, and there's a lot of s*** that happened before that they'll be really cross about."
