An eyelash curler. A pizza oven. ‘Very good white wine’. Those are all items chosen by celebrity guests as a luxury on the long-running radio show Desert Island Discs.
In 2009, comedian and author David Walliams was invited on and chose as his luxury a gun, saying that if he had to endure loneliness, he would want 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.’
The host, Kirsty Young, was audibly taken aback, but it wasn’t a joke.
Indeed, like much of his life and tortured psyche, there is little funny about Walliams.
That has never been truer than now, as he stands accused of sexual assault and inappropriate sexual contact by a number of women who say he ‘groomed’ them as teenage girls in a slew of very serious allegations. Walliams denies all.
Raised in suburban Banstead, Surrey, Walliams went from early fame on the sketch show Little Britain alongside Matt Lucas to mainstream success on Britain’s Got Talent, then ITV’s biggest Saturday night show.
He is also one of the most successful authors of children’s books in the world, selling more than 60 million copies, although his publisher HarperCollins dropped him last December amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards some of its female employees.
Diagnosed as bipolar after finding fame, he has spoken with unsparing honesty about the deep unhappiness which has blighted his life. This torment has seen him apparently unable to sustain a relationship.
Instead, he has had a series of passionate crushes on unattainable female friends. These have apparently included TV 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
And, as we know now, he has also pursued romantic relationships with starstruck young women, some still in their teens, inviting them to see him at work on Britain’s Got Talent, on comedy tours or even in the intimacy of his own home.
That much of the current allegations he accepts. What he denies is that any of the activity was non-consensual.
So what is the truth about David Walliams’ sexuality and relationships with women?
Born in London on August 20, 1971, David Williams was the youngest child of Kathleen and Peter Williams. He later changed his name for Equity purposes, as there was already an actor named David Williams.
Peter was an engineer for London Transport, and Kathleen a lab assistant at a school. For many years she was also a Brown Owl – an adult leader for the local Brownies (a branch of Girlguiding).
Walliams describes his father as a remote figure who didn’t even listen when Little Britain was first broadcast on the radio, or praise it when it was a success on TV.
‘I never felt good enough to be his son,’ Walliams wrote in his 2012 autobiography Camp David.
When Peter Williams died in 2007, David’s wreath bore the message: ‘All I ever wanted was to make you proud.’
His mother ‘overcompensated’ for Peter’s remoteness, showering David and his sister Julie with love and attention.
David says that the time in his life when he was happiest was just before he started school, when he and his mother would sit in the kitchen, eating mince and mash for lunch and listening to Jimmy Young’s show on BBC Radio 2.
He enjoyed attending Cubs (a section of Scouts), where he had his first sexual experience, aged ten, when one of the boys invited him into his tent.
This early experimentation went further when he joined the Sea Scouts. His group was run by an ex-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 added: ‘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’ most days in the playground. He says that the name-calling, although cruel, was understandable because he was ‘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.’
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
Perhaps inevitably, he was cast in a school play as England’s 17th-century Queen Henrietta Maria, wearing a wig and a dress.
This was a turning point, for the way he fanned himself throughout the performance brought the house down. ‘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, he was attracted to girls, but he was full of self-loathing. ‘Sometimes I think it would be simpler if I was [gay] because everyone thinks I am,’ he has 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 says that the first time he tried to kill himself was when he was 12 years old and at a Sea Scouts camp.
He recounts in his book that he went to a stream where he had earlier been playing with a rope swing and fashioned a noose, but he was too tall.
It was not to be his last attempt. After his first term at Bristol University, where he was studying drama, he went back home to his family for Christmas and was hit by a ‘swell’ of depression. One day in January he waited for his parents to leave for work and then considered ways to kill himself.
He thought about gassing himself in the oven but didn’t want his mother to be injured if there was an explosion when she switched on the lights. He took an overdose but was found by his mother and rushed to hospital.
Yet the will to live – and his quest for fame – did not fade.
In 1999, long before he was famous, he had a clandestine affair with Caroline Aherne, then at her professional peak after The Mrs Merton Show and The Royle Family.
They met in The Groucho Club in London. They dated for a year, but he said that she would ring him when drunk and make accusations, saying: ‘You’ve got no love in your heart, you’re incapable of it.’ He said: ‘When she drank, the alcohol poisoned her mind.’ He believes she was too scarred by her father, a violent alcoholic, to find happiness.
‘The situation was making me unbearably sad. It broke my heart that we couldn’t be together,’ he wrote.
He adds that he also suffered from what he calls a sex addiction. He says a girlfriend broke up with him in 2002 after reading his diary, which contained a tally of ‘meaningless’ sexual encounters that began in around 1999, starting with a fling with an air hostess.
He wrote: ‘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.’
Following the break-up, he spent a week in The Priory, where he was given antidepressants and some pills to help him sleep. There were also therapy sessions.
As soon as he got out he resumed work on the final scripts for the first series of Little Britain.
Walliams and Matt Lucas on Little Britain, which aired from 2003 to 2006
He worried what would become of him when filming for the show was over. ‘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.’
Huge success followed Little Britain, and Walliams became one of London’s most invited celebrities, hanging out with Kate Moss, Elton John, David Furnish, Patrick Cox, Liz Hurley, Russell Brand and others.
For all his self-loathing, covered by camp innuendo, Walliams has always been clear about how ‘intoxicating’ he finds beautiful women, and he has always been clear – like Russell Brand – that his fame meant he got to spend time with them.
Walliams told an interviewer in 2008: ‘The thing about beauty is you do feel it is very compelling, because you hope that it rubs off on you in some way.’
In his book he says he fell for Geri Halliwell because of her ‘beautifully flat stomach’.
Patsy Kensit was a dalliance he couldn’t resist talking about, too, noting in his book: ‘Patsy fancies you,’ said Matt [Lucas]. I didn’t take much persuading to meet up with her.’
He adds: ‘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, an affable, slightly hippie figure, in 2009 – only a few weeks after she came out of rehab for alcohol addiction – he was instantly besotted.
At their wedding barely a year later, in May 2010, Walliams had the band strike up the theme from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast – a joke about their relative attractiveness which made some of the guests wince.
Although the marriage lasted just five years, it produced a son, Alfred, now 13.
Talking to the Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Virgin Radio in 2024, he said of his son, ‘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’.’
Yet the demons continued.
‘Every day I think I’m fat,’ he once said. That charity swim of his in the Thames in 2011, which drew universal praise and raised more than £1million for Sport Relief? Walliams said he only did it to try to ease his feelings of worthlessness.
After his marriage ended in March 2015, a friend of Walliams 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 hinted, pointedly, that Walliams had been impossible to live with, saying: ‘Lara had had enough.’
A few weeks before the announcement of their split, Walliams had effected a brutal take-off of her accent at a party. He had reportedly been wounded by the apparent sexual chemistry between Stone and the singer Justin Bieber, whom she had straddled in a jeans advertisement.
Yet still his star rose. By now an established judge on Britain’s Got Talent – where he would joke with exaggerated campness that he was Simon Cowell’s ‘number one girl’ – Walliams was still feted by the celebrities he longed to impress and found himself in favour even in higher circles.
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, he was presented with 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.’
It was not to last. His removal from the BGT judging panel in 2023 after his deeply disrespectful comments about contestants, which he didn’t think were being recorded, marked the beginning of his downfall.
He’d said of one woman: ‘She’s like the slightly boring girl you meet in the pub that thinks you want to f*** them, but you don’t.’
Walliams sued the production company Fremantle for damages, and his lawyers said that the episode had, again, left him suicidal.
Strikingly, given the timing of these accusations, aired so soon after Russell Brand began his ten-and-a-half year sentence for rape and sexual assault, the two men were friends. They had got to know each other in 2002 and moved in the same social circles for years.
Walliams was among those who travelled to India to celebrate Brand’s 2010 wedding to pop star Katy Perry.
Brand, of course, also said that he was a sex addict and had undergone a spell in a residential clinic in America to help him.
Back in 2008, Walliams explained: ‘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 engulfed in a serious crisis. There will be arguments over whether allegations against him rise to the level of criminal offending.
Last week, Sara Mansoori KC told the High Court that Walliams had already tried to kill himself twice since learning of the allegations, including while absconding from a secure hospital in July.
When he was the most successful comedian of his generation, Walliams wrote in his diary: ‘If hell is in your mind, then I have been to hell.’
He is still there.
