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She was a child bride of the time lord
Chris Evans, accompanying him on a
hair-raising journey into new dimensions
of bad taste aboard his reality-defying
vehicle, a supermarket trolley of booze,
while nail-biting onlookers cowered
behind their armchairs. Then Billie Piper
woke up to find it was all a bad dream
and she was still the nation’s
sweetheart.
This victimised stereotype of Piper,
who ends her run as Doctor Who’s
popular side-kick on Saturday, could not
have been further from the truth, we
learnt from her last week. Evans, the
enfant terrible of British radio and
television, was a sage who rescued her
from alcohol and such is her gratitude to
the millionaire broadcaster that she is bucking the trend
of gold-digging wives by
not asking for a penny at their no-fault
divorce in September.
When 17-year-old Piper met the
34-year-old Evans it was one of the best
things that happened to her, she told the
Radio Times. A fugitive from the pop
industry that made her a star, she had
turned to drink and drugs. “Chris
and I found each other when it could have
gone badly wrong for both of us and we
saved each other from our worlds of
madness.”
Evans, a legendary boozer and lothario
whose career was unravelling
spectacularly at the time, was portrayed
as a corrupting influence — an image
he did little to discourage as the couple
were photographed on several occasions
looking tired and emotional. The once
coltish Piper appeared bloated and
bleary-eyed.
But everything turned out for the
best, it seems. The 23-year-old actress
has no designs on the £30m fortune her
husband has made from his television
production company, UMTV, and elsewhere. “I’m
not taking a penny from him. I think
that’s disgusting,”
she declared. “We didn’t want
to accuse each other of being
assholes.”
Others have not been so delicate. One
newspaper writer warned last week that it
was extremely dangerous to go around
saying she won’t claim the £5m some
lawyers think is her due —
“Anna Nicole Smith nearly choked to
death on her cornflakes.”
Most people wanted a happy ending for
Piper, a bright spark of flaxen mane, doe
eyes and a dazzling array of white teeth.
Since splitting from Evans in 2004 she
has been integral to the television
success of Doctor Who as Rose Tyler,
attracting young audiences to the
regenerated series and winning the most
popular actress award at the National
Television Awards. She was an inspired
choice as the street-smart foil to
Christopher Eccleston and then David
Tennant as the Doctor’s
reincarnations.
She delighted critics in a modern
version of The Miller’s Tale in 2003
and in last year’s televised
adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, in
which she played Hero the weather girl to
bickering newsreaders Benedick (Damian
Lewis) and Beatrice (Sarah Parish). She
has also appeared in several films,
including The Calcium Kid, with Orlando
Bloom, and the horror flick Spirit Trap.
So it may seem churlish to mention
that Piper’s version of events has
undergone the occasional rewrite. As a
15-year-old pop sensation she told The
Sun in 1998: “I’m too young for
sex and drugs and rock’n’roll.
I think going out to showbiz parties all
the time and getting drunk is a bit
naff.” Yet this was the moment she
started going seriously off the rails
with drink and drugs, she admitted last
week. “I tried all those things.
Everyone else was and it seemed like
fun.” She felt suicidal.
At the start of her relationship with
Evans she told the News of the World in
2000 that her father was “a Chris
Evans fan” who had given the couple
his blessing. It later transpired that
her parents strongly disapproved of Evans
and were “furious”. Last week
she lamented that she had not invited
them to the wedding.
Perhaps we shall learn more in her
autobiography, in which she has promised
to tell the truth “warts and
all” for a six-figure sum. She was
born in Swindon, eventually eclipsing the
former topless model Melinda Messenger as
the Wiltshire town’s most famous
export. Her father Paul was a builder and
her mother Mandy a housewife who cared
for their four children.
She was only 11 when she announced she
wanted to be an actress. “I was
brutally ambitious as a kid —
desperate to be grown-up, desperate to
leave Swindon,” she said. It
wasn’t the fault of her parents,
“solid lovely people”, but she
just wanted more than an after-school
drama class once a week. The following
year, after winning a place at the Sylvia
Young Theatre school in London, she was
dispatched into the care of a great-aunt
and uncle.
Piper had been doing commercials for
Smash Hits when the music producer Hugh
Goldsmith spotted the 14-year-old on the
front cover of Music Week. Goldsmith was
starting up an offshoot label to Virgin
and wanted to sign a young female artist.
Piper couldn’t sing a note and the
thought of being a singer had never
occurred to her. “He came to my
school and hunted me down. He asked me if
I could sing and I just went, ‘Yeah,
I’ll do it’.”
Goldsmith packaged her as
“Billie”, projecting her
pubescent appeal in catchy if anodyne
songs. At 15, with the hit Because We
Want To, she became the youngest female
singer to reach No 1 since Helen Shapiro
with Walking Back to Happiness in 1961.
She declared: “I represent youth
power and I hope being No 1 inspires
young people to do what they want.”
This freedom, she discovered, was not
open to manufactured pop singers like
herself. She loved the buzz of being on
stage in front of a live audience. But
every minute of the day was taken up by a
schedule of being driven to meetings,
video recordings and performances. She
became a brat: “I was quite
demanding. It was ignorance. My parents
were the only people who would say no to
me.” She missed home and began a
downward spiral of drink and drugs.
The low point came when she was
touring America. “I was in Chicago,
and it suddenly dawned on me that I
didn’t want to be there doing this.
It petrified me.”
Then her ginger-haired saviour
arrived. While appearing on Evans’s
TFI Friday television programme in 2000,
she realised he was a soul mate. He wooed
her with a £100,000 Ferrari filled with
rose petals (cynics said he knew she did
not even have a provisional driving
licence.) “We’re in love,”
she announced from a hotel in Madeira.
“We haven’t slept together yet.
But we’re sharing this room and
snogging each other’s lips
off.”
It was a national cringe moment. The
former DJ was nearly twice her age and
had seduced and dumped the likes of
Melanie Sykes, Anna Friel and Geri
Halliwell, all of whom had mistaken him
for a serious suitor.
Piper didn’t see it like that.
Evans told her she didn’t have to go
along with the pop industry’s
“complete bullshit” and
encouraged her to resume her acting.
“I didn’t care a f*** about
what anybody said, because finally I was
doing something for myself, and that made
me happy.”
Forebodings increased when video
footage showed Piper as a tiny bride
being led down the aisle by Evans and
another middle-aged DJ, Danny Baker, at a
ceremony in Las Vegas in May 2001. The
tabloids gleefully recorded the
couple’s benders. “Of course we
went out and got completely lashed, and
we had a great time — who
doesn’t?” she said recently.
“The age difference? We never even
spoke about it.”
A month after the wedding, Evans was
sacked by Virgin Radio, the company he
had bought from Richard Branson for
£85m, then sold for £225m, along with
his Ginger production company, in 2000.
He had been seen out drinking with Piper
when he told the station he was too ill
to work. Piper became prone to collapsing
in bars from “overwork” and was
dropped by her record label. They looked
like a couple in freefall. Eventually
they agreed to an amicable separation,
having “outgrown each other”.
Since Piper’s career took off in
the Tardis she has not looked back. She
is to star in an ITV adaptation of Jane
Austen’s Mansfield Park and will
play the 19th-century sleuth Sally
Lockhart in a BBC adaptation of The Ruby
in the Smoke by the author Philip
Pullman.
She now lives in London with her
28-year-old boyfriend, Amadu Sowe, a law
student whom she has known since she was
13. And Evans? “He’s still my
best friend.”
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