Here are 17 interesting facts about Dua Lipa.
1. Dua Lipa is her real name and she’s 25
She was born on the 22nd August 1995 in London, England.
2. She has two siblings
Dua Lipa has two siblings! Both younger, she has a little sister Rina and brother Gjin who both collected one of Dua’s 2018 BRIT awards in front of the likes of Ed Sheeran and Stormzy.
3. She was told she couldn’t sing at age 11
When Dua Lipa was just 11 years old, she wanted to join the choir at school. Unfortunately for the future star, a teacher told her that “she couldn’t sing.” Thankfully, Lipa didn’t let the discouragement prevent her from pursuing her goals.
4. She left home and moved to a different country when she was just 15
Dua Lipa’s parents are Albanian and left Kosovo for London in the ’90s, which is where the star was born. However, when she was 11, they returned to Kosovo. By 15, the singer was eager to pursue her career and managed to get her parents to allow her to head back to England. “There was an older girl from Kosovo moving to London at the same time and my parents knew her parents, so they said I could live with her. Like a kind of guardian,” Lipa told NME in 2017.
5. It was a struggle but it helped her grow
While the girls did live together when they got to England, Lipa ended up having to fend for herself. “The cooking and the cleaning … that was tough,” she admitted with what NME referred to as a “self-deprecating laugh.” The star explained that the “realization” that “no one was going to clean up after” her was not thrilling. Lipa even recalled her mom coming for a visit and being unimpressed with the amount of unwashed laundry that her daughter had stashed away in her wardrobe.
However, Lipa says that independence and the resulting responsibility forced her to “grow up” and helped her “mature.” She noted, “[It] made me who I am today. I’m really grateful for it, but I do remember it being a struggle.”
6. She was almost arrested at 15
When she was 15, the singer and her friends were almost arrested when they made a bubble bath. When they found themselves with too many bubbles, they tossed the extra suds off of a balcony and out the window. While that might not have been the best idea, it also doesn’t sound terribly illegal, amirite? However, the soapy situation then took a turn for the worse when the bubbles landed on a cop down below and, as a result, Lipa was told she might be arrested for “assaulting” a police officer.
“It came to the point where he was like, ‘We’re gonna take you down to Scotland Yard,’” the star recalled in 2016 while chatting with Inside The Story. “I was in tears by that point. I was like, ‘I can’t go to jail. I’m too little.’ He was like: ‘How old are you? … 15? Okay, we’ll just send you a warning in the post.’” Luckily for Lipa, the warning never showed up and her parents weren’t notified about the slippery inciden
7. She started off on YouTube
“When I was 15 I was posting covers online but it was never one of those things that went viral, it was more of a way for me to use it as a portfolio,” Dua says. She covered Etta James’ I Would Rather Go Blind and Alessia Cara’s Here.
8. She went to the same school as Amy Winehouse, Rita Ora, and other future stars.
She studied at the Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone, London after she completed her secondary education. This is also where stars like Rita Ora and the late Amy Winehouse honed their performing skills. Other alumni include Spice Girls’ Emma Bunton and actor Nicholas Hoult.
9. She worked on the door of a club in Mayfair
“I worked on a door at a nightclub and that was my worst job ever. I had management in my ear saying ‘yeah people can come in, people can’t’ and it came to the point where I had to turn down my own friends for wearing trainers. That was when I was like, ok I’m out.”
10. She got signed at the age of 18
At the age of 18, Dua was snapped up by Warner Music. “I remember calling my parents in Kosovo and telling them to catch a flight to London so they could come to the signing,” she said.
11. She released her self-titled debut album in 2017
She has released in total two studio albums, two reissues, one remix album, four extended plays (EPs), 25 singles (including three as a featured artist), ten promotional singles, two charity singles and 28 music videos.
12. She once modelled
She told Harper’s Bazaar in 2017, “I got approached to do modeling when I was really young … but I was never the right size, I was never cut out to be a model, and I never really got any real jobs.” She was told that if she lost weight, she’d get booked, which “put [her] in a really bad mindset.”
“The reason why I thought modeling was a good idea was because I thought I could make loads of friends that could help me in music,” Lipa explained. “Obviously, that wasn’t the case.” Despite that fact that Lipa wasn’t keen on modeling, she still says that she’s “grateful” that she did it, because not only is it “part of [the] journey to where [she] is now,” but, she added, “It also showed me a lot of what I wanted and what made me happy, and it wasn’t that at all.”
13. She’s currently dating Anwar Hadid
If the name didn’t give anything away, Anwar Hadid is the the model brother of supermodels Gigi and Bella.
They began dating in June 2019 after meeting at a party, but Dua made the first move by sliding into his DMs.
14. Her Dad is her BFF
Dua’s dad Dukagjin Lipa was in an Albanian rock band and was “one of [Dua’s] main influences” because she “grew up listening to his music.”
“My father was a musician so I’ve always been really inspired by him and living in a really musical household,” she told GLAMOUR. “Those are the things that really inspired me and I feel like it was inevitable to fall into this as a career. My parents listened to a lot of Bowie, Bob Dylan, The Stereophonics and Sting – The Police, Radiohead.
Nowadays, she refers to him as her BFF while posting photos of the duo when she was younger, as well as on the red carpet — where he sometimes (adorably) escorts her to events
15. She has lots of accolades to her name
Dua Lipa has received multiple accolades, including three Grammy Awards, three Brit Awards, two MTV Europe Music Awards, one MTV Video Music Award, and an American Music Award.
16. She has a huge social media following
Dua Lipa is on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok and has a following of over 87 million across all platforms.
17. She’s worth $16 million
According to The Sun, Dua Lipa had filed papers to trademark her name around the world, which would cover “hundreds of items including clothes and cosmetics, as well as computer games, books, jewelry, and even kitchen utensils.” An insider explained that Lipa “knows she is in high demand right now and can make a fortune.”
She currently has a net worth of $16 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. And if Lipa’s future financial aims go forward as planned, then that number could seriously spike sometime soon.
(Photos: @Dua Lipa/Instagram)
References: NickiSwift, GlamourMagazine, Capitalfm, Nme.
