An eyelash curler, a pizza oven and a bottle of “very good white wine” are among the luxuries selected by celebrity guests on the long-running BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs.
When comedian and children’s author David Walliams appeared on the show in 2009, he chose a gun. He explained that, if forced to live in isolation, he would want a way to end his life.
“I can’t stand being on my own,” he said. “I hate it. I have a pathological fear of being on my own. When I’m left with my thoughts, I start to unravel and think about self-destructive things.”
Presenter Kirsty Young sounded visibly shocked. Walliams was not joking.
As with many aspects of his life and troubled inner world, there was little humour in what he had said.
Those words have taken on fresh significance as Walliams faces allegations from several women, including claims that he groomed them when they were teenagers and subjected them to sexual assault or inappropriate sexual contact. Walliams denies all the allegations.
Raised in Banstead, Surrey, Walliams first became known through the sketch series Little Britain, created with Matt Lucas. He later reached an even wider audience as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, once ITV’s flagship Saturday-night entertainment show.
His children’s books have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide, making him one of the most commercially successful authors in the genre. But publisher HarperCollins ended its relationship with him in December last year after allegations of inappropriate conduct towards female employees.
Walliams has said he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after becoming famous and has spoken openly about the severe depression that has affected him for much of his life. He has also struggled to maintain long-term relationships.
Instead, he has often described developing intense feelings for women who were friends or otherwise out of reach. Those women have reportedly included television presenter Lisa Snowdon, actress Kate Beckinsale and singer Natalie Imbruglia.
David Walliams went from early fame on the sketch show Little Britain to mainstream success on Britain’s Got Talent, then ITV’s biggest Saturday night show
It is now alleged that he also pursued relationships with young women who admired him, some of whom were still teenagers. They say he invited them to watch him perform on Britain’s Got Talent, attend comedy shows or visit him privately at home.
Walliams has acknowledged some of the encounters described in the allegations. He disputes the suggestion that any of them involved non-consensual behaviour.
The allegations have inevitably revived questions about Walliams’s relationships, sexuality and attitude towards women.
David Williams was born in London on August 20, 1971, the younger child of Kathleen and Peter Williams. He later adopted the professional name David Walliams because another actor was already registered with the name David Williams.
His father worked as an engineer for London Transport, while his mother was a school laboratory assistant. She also spent many years as a Brown Owl, the adult leader of a local Brownies group.
Walliams has portrayed his father as emotionally distant. He recalled that Peter did not listen to the early radio broadcasts of Little Britain and offered little praise when the programme became a television hit.
“I never felt good enough to be his son,” Walliams wrote in his 2012 autobiography, Camp David.
When Peter died in 2007, the message on Walliams’s funeral wreath read: “All I ever wanted was to make you proud.”
He has said his mother responded to that emotional distance by giving him and his sister Julie an abundance of affection and attention.
Walliams has described the years before he started school as the happiest period of his childhood. He remembered sitting with his mother in the kitchen, eating mince and mash while listening to Jimmy Young on BBC Radio 2.
He joined the Cubs and later recalled having an early sexual experience at the age of ten after another boy invited him into a tent.
He wrote that his experiences continued when he joined the Sea Scouts, whose group was led by a former merchant seaman. Walliams recalled games in which the leader chased and spanked the boys, describing the atmosphere as confusing and “very strange”, even though he did not characterise it as sexual abuse.
He also wrote that the boys experimented sexually with one another in the dark, and that he formed a particularly strong attachment to one of them.
“After we were intimate, he would become so angry about what had happened that he turned violent towards me,” Walliams recalled. “My entire experience of sex at that age can be reduced to one word: shame.”
At primary school, he was regularly called “gay” by other children. Walliams has said the bullying was cruel, but that his mannerisms were noticeably feminine.
“The way I ran, threw a ball, spoke and flicked my hair was just like a girl,” he wrote. “In my case, a big, fat, ugly girl.”
Back in 2008, Walliams said: ‘I meet up with Russell Brand, we have these chats about relationships and misery.’ The pair are pictured at a British Comedy Awards afterparty in 2006
It was perhaps unsurprising that he was cast as Queen Henrietta Maria in a school production, complete with a wig and dress.
His exaggerated performance, particularly the way he fanned himself, produced huge laughter from the audience. Walliams later called it a defining moment.
“It was as beautiful as moondust,” he said. “I knew then that I wanted to make people laugh.”
Although he had experimented with boys, Walliams has consistently said he was attracted to women. He has also spoken about the self-doubt caused by being assumed to be gay.
“Sometimes I think life would be simpler if I were gay, because everyone thinks I am,” he once said. “I love women. I love being around them. I find them incredible and intoxicating. I have never felt with a man what I feel with women.”
Walliams has said his first suicide attempt came when he was 12, during a Sea Scouts camp.
In his autobiography, he recalled going to a stream where he had earlier played on a rope swing and trying to make a noose, but abandoning the attempt because he was too tall.
He later described another serious episode after beginning a drama course at Bristol University. Returning home for Christmas, he said he was overwhelmed by a powerful depression. After his parents left for work one morning, he considered different ways of taking his own life.
He eventually took an overdose and was discovered by his mother, who took him to hospital.
Despite those episodes, his determination to build a career never disappeared.
In 1999, before he became widely famous, he began a private relationship with Caroline Aherne, then at the height of her success following The Mrs Merton Show and The Royle Family.
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They met at London’s Groucho Club and were together for about a year. Walliams said Aherne sometimes called him while drinking and accused him of being incapable of love. He believed her own difficult childhood, including her father’s alcoholism and violence, had affected her ability to find happiness.
“The situation made me desperately unhappy,” he wrote. “It broke my heart that we could not be together.”
Walliams has also described what he regarded as an addiction to sex. He said a girlfriend ended their relationship in 2002 after reading his diary, which listed a series of casual encounters beginning around 1999, including one with an air hostess.
“I believed sex might take away the sadness,” he wrote. “Instead, it made everything worse. I fell deeper and deeper into despair. I had become addicted to sex.”
After the break-up, he spent a week at the Priory, where he received antidepressants, medication to help him sleep and therapy.
Once discharged, he returned to work on the scripts for the first series of Little Britain.
Walliams and Matt Lucas on Little Britain, which aired from 2003 to 2006
He worried about how he would cope once filming ended. “When I wasn’t busy, suicidal thoughts haunted me,” he wrote. “I had a supply of sleeping pills and spent a great deal of time wondering whether I had enough to kill myself.”
The success of Little Britain transformed Walliams into one of London’s most sought-after celebrities. His social circle included Kate Moss, Elton John, David Furnish, Patrick Cox, Liz Hurley and Russell Brand.
Despite the insecurity he often expressed beneath his camp humour, Walliams spoke openly about his fascination with glamorous women and acknowledged that fame gave him access to people he admired.
“Beauty can be incredibly compelling because you hope some of it might rub off on you,” he told an interviewer in 2008.
In his memoir, he wrote that he was drawn to Geri Halliwell partly because of her “beautifully flat stomach”.
He also recounted an encounter with Patsy Kensit. “Patsy fancies you,” Matt Lucas reportedly told him. “I didn’t need much persuading to meet her,” Walliams wrote.
“I became so famous that people recognised me everywhere. Women threw themselves at me, and sometimes I caught them,” he wrote. “Then I became rich. My life grew stranger and stranger. Like Alice in Wonderland, I entered a world of dreams and nightmares.”
Walliams met Dutch model Lara Stone in 2009, shortly after she had completed treatment for alcohol addiction. He quickly became infatuated with her.
They married in May 2010, less than a year later. At the wedding, Walliams had the band play the theme from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, a joke about their perceived difference in looks that reportedly made some guests uncomfortable.
The marriage lasted five years and produced a son, Alfred, who is now 13.
Speaking about Alfred on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Virgin Radio in 2024, Walliams said: “I think back to the day he was born. I always tell him, ‘The day you were born was the happiest day of my life.’”
But his personal struggles continued.
“Every day I think I’m fat,” he once said. He raised more than £1 million for Sport Relief by swimming the Thames in 2011, an achievement widely praised at the time. Walliams later said he had undertaken it partly because he hoped it would relieve his feelings of worthlessness.
After his marriage ended in March 2015, one friend said: “He is deeply unhappy underneath it all. If you are that unhappy, I don’t know how you sustain a marriage.”
Another suggested that Stone had reached the end of her patience, saying simply: “Lara had had enough.”
Shortly before the separation was announced, Walliams reportedly mocked Stone’s accent at a party. He was also said to have been upset by the apparent chemistry between Stone and singer Justin Bieber in a jeans advertisement in which she straddled him.
His public profile nevertheless continued to grow. As a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, he adopted an exaggeratedly camp persona and joked that he was Simon Cowell’s “number one girl”. He remained popular with the celebrity world he had long wanted to enter.
Walliams is one of the most successful authors of children’s books in the world, selling more than 60 million copies. Photographed with his book Gangsta Granny in 2011
His removal from the BGT judging panel in 2023 marked the beginning of his downfall
In October 2017, Walliams received an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to charity and the arts.
“I remind myself every day how fortunate I am to work with such extraordinary people,” he told reporters. “I never take any of it for granted, least of all today.”
His standing changed dramatically after he left the Britain’s Got Talent judging panel in 2023. The departure followed the publication of recordings in which he made offensive comments about contestants, believing the conversation was private.
Of one woman, he was recorded saying: “She’s like the slightly boring girl you meet in the pub who thinks you want to sleep with her, but you don’t.”
Walliams later sued production company Fremantle for damages. His lawyers said the controversy had again left him experiencing suicidal thoughts.
The latest allegations have also drawn attention to Walliams’s long friendship with Russell Brand, who is currently serving a ten-and-a-half-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault.
The pair met in 2002 and remained part of the same social circles for years. Walliams travelled to India for Brand’s 2010 wedding to singer Katy Perry.
Brand, like Walliams, had spoken publicly about sex addiction and had spent time at a residential treatment centre in the United States.
In 2008, Walliams said: “I meet Russell Brand and we talk about relationships and misery. I see him as a more extreme version of me, but he always says, ‘Don’t make me get into that bed on my own.’” Brand is now in prison.
Walliams, meanwhile, is facing a profound personal and professional crisis. Any future legal debate will include questions about whether the allegations amount to criminal offences.
Last week, Sara Mansoori KC told the High Court that Walliams had made two suicide attempts since learning of the allegations, including one reported incident after he left a secure hospital in July.
At the height of his fame, Walliams wrote in his diary: “If hell is in your mind, then I have been to hell.”
He says he remains there.
