An eyelash curler. A pizza oven. “Very good white wine.” Over the years, celebrity guests on the long-running BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs have chosen all three as their luxury item.
When comedian and author David Walliams appeared on the programme in 2009, he chose a gun. He explained that, if forced to endure extreme loneliness, he would want the means 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 am with my own thoughts I start to unravel and I start to think self-destructive thoughts.”
Presenter Kirsty Young sounded visibly shocked. Walliams was not joking.
As with so much of Walliams’s life and troubled inner world, there was little humour in the remark.
That has become even more apparent as he faces allegations from several women who accuse him of sexual assault and inappropriate sexual contact. Some say he “groomed” them when they were teenagers. Walliams denies all the allegations.
Raised in Banstead, Surrey, Walliams moved from early recognition on the sketch show Little Britain, alongside Matt Lucas, to mainstream fame as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, once ITV’s biggest Saturday-night programme.
He also became one of the world’s most successful children’s authors, selling more than 60 million books. But publisher HarperCollins dropped him last December amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards some female employees.
After finding fame, Walliams was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He has spoken with striking candour about the unhappiness that has shaped much of his life, including the difficulty he has apparently faced in sustaining a relationship.
Instead, he has experienced a succession of intense infatuations with women who were often unavailable to him. They have reportedly included television presenter Lisa Snowdon, actress Kate Beckinsale and singer Natalie Imbruglia.
David Walliams rose from early fame on the sketch show Little Britain to mainstream success on Britain’s Got Talent, then ITV’s biggest Saturday-night programme
It is now alleged that he also pursued relationships with young women who were captivated by his fame. Some were still teenagers when he invited them to watch him work on Britain’s Got Talent, attend comedy tours or visit him at home.
Walliams accepts some of the activity described in the allegations. He denies that any of it was non-consensual.
So what does Walliams’s history reveal about his sexuality, emotional struggles and relationships with women?
David Williams was born in London on August 20, 1971, the youngest child of Kathleen and Peter Williams. He later changed his surname spelling for Equity purposes because another actor was already known as David Williams.
His father, Peter, worked as an engineer for London Transport, while his mother, Kathleen, was a school laboratory assistant. She also spent many years as a Brown Owl, the adult leader of a local Brownie pack within Girlguiding.
Walliams has described his father as emotionally distant. Peter did not listen when Little Britain was first broadcast on radio, he said, and offered little praise when the show later became a television success.
“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 David’s funeral wreath read: “All I ever wanted was to make you proud.”
Walliams said his mother compensated for Peter’s reserve by surrounding him and his sister, Julie, with affection and attention.
He has recalled that the happiest period of his childhood came before he started school. He and his mother would sit in the kitchen, eating mince and mash while listening to Jimmy Young’s programme on BBC Radio 2.
He joined the Cubs, part of the Scout movement, where he said he had his first sexual experience at the age of ten after another boy invited him into his tent.
He described further experiences after joining the Sea Scouts, whose group was led by a former merchant seaman. “Most of the games we played in the hall involved him chasing and spanking us,” Walliams recalled. “What happened at the Sea Scouts wasn’t sexual abuse as such, it all felt more innocent than that, but it was still very strange.”
He continued: “Of course we would fiddle with each other in the dark. One boy I developed a sustained attraction for, and we would often pair off.
“After we were intimate he would be so full of anger at what he had done he would become violent with me. My whole experience of sex at this time can be summed up in one word. Shame.”
At primary school, Walliams was called “gay” by other children almost every day. He said the abuse was cruel, although he understood why he had been targeted because he considered himself “inescapably effeminate”.
“The way I ran, the way I threw a ball, the way I talked, the way I flicked my hair… was just like a girl. In my case, a big fat ugly girl.”
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 after-party in 2006
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was cast in a school play as Henrietta Maria, the 17th-century Queen of England, wearing a wig and a dress.
The performance became a turning point. His exaggerated fan-waving brought the audience down, and Walliams realised he wanted a life in comedy. “It was as beautiful as moondust. I knew what I wanted to do with my life, I wanted to make people laugh,” he said.
Despite his early experiences with boys, Walliams said he was attracted to girls, while also struggling with deep self-loathing. “Sometimes I think it would be simpler if I was [gay] because everyone thinks I am,” he said. “If I was gay, I would just get on with it. I love women. I love being around women. I find them incredible and intoxicating. I have never had that feeling I get with women with a man.”
He 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. He fashioned a noose but was too tall for it to work.
It was not his final attempt. After his first term studying drama at Bristol University, he returned to his parents’ home for Christmas and was overwhelmed by depression. One January day, after his parents had left for work, he began considering ways to take his own life.
He considered using the oven but worried that an explosion could injure his mother when she switched on the lights. He then took an overdose, but his mother found him and he was taken to hospital.
Even so, his determination to live—and his ambition to become famous—remained.
In 1999, years before he became a household name, Walliams began a secret relationship with Caroline Aherne, who was then at the height of her career following The Mrs Merton Show and The Royle Family.
They met at London’s Groucho Club and dated for about a year. Walliams said Aherne sometimes called him while drunk and accused him of having no love in his heart. “You’re incapable of it,” he recalled her saying. He believed her difficult relationship with her violent alcoholic father had left her unable to find lasting happiness.
“The situation was making me unbearably sad. It broke my heart that we couldn’t be together,” he wrote.
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Walliams has also written about what he described as a sex addiction. He said a girlfriend left him in 2002 after reading his diary, which recorded a series of “meaningless” sexual encounters dating back to about 1999, beginning with a fling involving an air hostess.
“I thought sex could take away the sadness. However, it just made it worse. And I sank lower and lower into despair. I had become a sex addict,” he wrote.
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 in Little Britain, which ran from 2003 to 2006
He feared what might happen when production ended. “When I wasn’t busy, thoughts of suicide haunted me. I now had a cache of sleeping pills. Whether I had enough to kill myself I didn’t know, but I spent a long time obsessing about it.”
The success of Little Britain made Walliams one of London’s most sought-after celebrities. He socialised with figures including Kate Moss, Elton John, David Furnish, Patrick Cox, Liz Hurley and Russell Brand.
Behind the camp innuendo and self-deprecating humour, Walliams has consistently described beautiful women as “intoxicating”. He has also acknowledged that fame gave him access to women he admired.
“The thing about beauty is you do feel it is very compelling, because you hope that it rubs off on you in some way,” he told an interviewer in 2008.
In his autobiography, he said he was drawn to Geri Halliwell because of her “beautifully flat stomach”.
He also wrote openly about an encounter with Patsy Kensit. “Patsy fancies you,” Matt Lucas reportedly told him. “I didn’t take much persuading to meet up with her.”
“I became so well-known that when I walked down the street every second person recognised me. Women threw themselves at me. And sometimes I caught them.
“Then I became rich… My life became curiouser and curiouser. Like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s novel I entered Wonderland. A place of dreams and nightmares.”
After meeting Dutch supermodel Lara Stone in 2009, just weeks after she had left rehabilitation for alcohol addiction, Walliams became instantly besotted. He described her as warm, easygoing and slightly unconventional.
They married less than a year later, in May 2010. At the ceremony, Walliams had the band play the theme from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast—a joke about their differing levels of attractiveness that reportedly made some guests uncomfortable.
The marriage lasted five years and produced a son, Alfred, who is now 13.
Speaking about his son on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Virgin Radio in 2024, Walliams said: “I think back to the day he was born. And I always say to 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. In 2011, he swam the length of the River Thames for Sport Relief, raising more than £1 million and earning widespread praise. Walliams said he undertook the challenge partly to escape feelings of worthlessness.
After the marriage ended in March 2015, one friend told me: “He is just deeply unhappy, underneath it all. If you are that unhappy, I don’t know how you can sustain a marriage.”
Another suggested that Walliams had become difficult to live with, saying pointedly: “Lara had had enough.”
Weeks before the couple announced their split, Walliams reportedly mocked Stone’s accent at a party. He was said to have been upset by the apparent sexual chemistry between Stone and singer Justin Bieber, with whom she appeared in a jeans advertisement.
His public profile continued to grow. By then an established Britain’s Got Talent judge, Walliams would joke in exaggerated camp style that he was Simon Cowell’s “number one girl”. He remained popular with celebrities he hoped to impress and was welcomed in increasingly influential circles.
Walliams, pictured with his novel Gangsta Granny in 2011, became one of the world’s most successful children’s authors, selling more than 60 million copies
His removal from the Britain’s Got Talent judging panel in 2023 marked the start of his professional downfall
In October 2017, Walliams received an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to charity and the arts.
“I remind myself every day how lucky I am to be working with incredible people,” he told reporters. “I don’t take any of it for granted, especially not today.”
That success did not last. His removal from the Britain’s Got Talent panel in 2023, after offensive comments about contestants that he believed were not being recorded, marked the beginning of a sharp fall from public favour.
Of one woman, he was recorded saying: “She’s like the slightly boring girl you meet in the pub that thinks you want to f*** them, but you don’t.”
Walliams later sued production company Fremantle for damages. His lawyers said the incident had once again contributed to suicidal thoughts.
The allegations against Walliams have emerged amid renewed scrutiny of his former friend Russell Brand, who has begun serving a ten-and-a-half-year sentence for rape and sexual assault. The two men met in 2002 and spent years moving in the same social circles.
Walliams was among the guests who travelled to India for Brand’s 2010 wedding to pop star Katy Perry.
Brand, like Walliams, described himself as a sex addict and said he had spent time in a residential clinic in the United States.
In 2008, Walliams said: “I meet up with Russell Brand, we have these chats about relationships and misery. I think of him as a more extreme case than me, but he always says: ‘Ooh, don’t make me get into that bed on my own! You’re not going to make me get into that bed on my own, are you?’” Brand is now behind bars.
Walliams, meanwhile, is facing a grave personal and professional crisis. Any criminal implications of the allegations will be determined through the appropriate legal process.
Last week, Sara Mansoori KC told the High Court that Walliams had attempted to take his own life twice since learning of the allegations, including during an escape from a secure hospital in July.
When he was one of Britain’s most successful comedians, Walliams wrote in his diary: “If hell is in your mind, then I have been to hell.”
He remains there.