Billie Piper: Mates prefer selfies with my pop gongs to stage awards

Piper said friends always make a beeline for her Smash Hits prizes from the Nineties
Selfies: Billie Piper's friends are fans of her music gongs
Dave Benett
Alistair Foster17 March 2017
The Weekender

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Billie Piper is an award-winning actress — but she says friends are more impressed by the gongs she earned as a teenage pop star.

At 15, Piper debuted at number one in the UK singles chart with Because We Want To. She had two more chart-toppers and released two albums before moving on to acting.

Now 34, Piper keeps her trophies — which include one for best actress at last year’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards — on show at the home she shares with her sons, Winston, eight, and Eugene, four. But she says guests always make a beeline for one of the Smash Hits prizes she won in the Nineties.

Piper, who could next month add an Olivier to her haul for the title role in Yerma, said: “The awards get handled. I leave them out because I love them, but no one’s really interested in anything apart from the Smash Hit award, to be honest!

Throwback: Billie Piper performing at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party in 2000
PA

“It is just so big and so Nineties, and anyone who comes in is straight over to it and in there for a selfie.

Billie Piper's career in pictures

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“Awards are great. I’m not one of those people who say, ‘Oh, they’re distasteful.’ Most of your life you won’t be getting them, so make hay.”

Yerma will return to the Young Vic in July for five weeks. In it, Piper plays a woman whose inability to have a child tears her life apart.

She said: “So many people I know have been looking at that life. It has been an incredibly painful journey for a few of my friends. That is why I leapt at it. I had a connection with it.”

Despite the emotional intensity of the role, Piper says she was able to switch out of it easily.

She added: “I was going home and being with my children so there was no time to sit in that mode. I would just go home and get ready for the school run the next day, pretty religiously. Something instinctively told me I had to take care of myself on that job.”

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