Billie De Jour

Billie Piper has played prostitute Belle De Jour in Secret Diary of a Call Girl, and the lead in Kay Mellor's A Passionate Woman, so she is no stranger to steamy parts. The modern-day Moll Flanders reveals all in this candid interview:

The first time I met Billie Piper, I was left feeling that I owed her an apology. She was heavily pregnant at the time, by husband, actor Laurence Fox, we got chatting about her birth options and I was perhaps a little too candid about what scenarios she might encounter, resulting in my glancing up at one point to be met with her huge caramel eyes, wide with trepidation.
Very bad form on my part: it really isn't on to scare first-time mums-to-be. What made it worse was that Piper had been great company – bright, open, witty, with a well-developed sense of the absurd – whether talking about her recent marriage to Fox, her first one to Chris Evans, her teenage pop career, playing Rose in Doctor Who, or the furore over her role as Belle de Jour in Secret Diary of a Call Girl. In the end, the guilt got too much and I sent an apology via her publicist. In October 2008, Piper had her baby, Winston James, after a 26-hour labour, followed by an emergency Caesarean. It all sounds pretty gruelling. "When the contractions first started I laughed, because I couldn't believe how painful it was," says Piper when we meet again, at the Observer photo shoot. "But we stopped off at Starbucks on the way to the hospital for a triple shot and a muffin before it all kicked off."
She is full-on glamorous, in a slinky dress, when I first see her having her photograph taken, and afterwards Piper, 27, changes into jeans and a zipped top. Petite, hair swept back from tawny skin, she looks both chic and staggeringly young and vulnerable.

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