Billie Piper

Billie Piper is one of my favourite actresses ever, and favourite woman who is an actress. She seems genuine. Funny, nice, but definitely tough. She started as a pop singer, became number one at 14. The industry nearly killed her, literally. The medias comments about her weight prompted her toward anorexia. If it had not been for her first husband Chris Evans (not the American actor, but British DJ) she would probably have died from the disease. Billie left the pop industry with his help at 18 and spent three years regaining what part of her life she had lost. Acting was her first love. She had taken lessons before her pop career at the very prestigious Sylvia Young theatre school for girls. She returned to acting in her early twenties, becoming popular in the cult sci-fi British show Doctor Who, where she played a de-sexualized good girl who, as consequence of her single mother, had, like Billie herself, to grow up a bit too soon. After Who, she decided to play the lead in the controversial Secret Diary of a Call Girl, a television series based off the non-fiction book The Intimate Adventures of a Call Girl. Many tried to dissuade her. Billie was keen to shed her good girl persona (having also played Fanny Price in Mansfield Park). The British are not too keen on the show but the Americans -- not surprisingly -- love it.

I spent a few late nights, alone, in my dingy flat in London, watching this show on youtube, eating cadbury chocolates and diet coke that I had gotten from the vendor outside and across the courtyard. So cold it was, walking across that yard, and the nighttime security guard would sometimes be out there doing rounds, and look at me, probably wondering why I was out there, getting chocolate, in my ridiculous adidas pants, and probably with something of a raccoon look about the eyes.

Billie Piper. I watched an episode of her in Doctor Who while I was in Heathrow, trying to calm myself, after having taken my wonder drug. Maybe it was watching her on my laptop that calmed me more than the pill. She plays very strong women. Even her character in Call Girl, which many would presume is a rather vapid character, is not entirely denigrating to women. Her character has read every feminist manifesto. Finished her A-levels. She is independent, but unable to establish emotional contact with men, whom she'd rather sleep with than marry. I'm sure there is some sort of essay one could write on this character. Society no longer dictates that women must marry in order to have a fulfilling sex life or be financially secure and Hannah (prostitute name: Belle) is a woman who takes full advantage of that freedom.