This article deals with accounts of pregnancy loss that could be triggering for some readers.

In 2014, Lily Allen contemplated doing something that could easily have changed the course of her life.

The British singer was the supporting act on Miley Cyrus' Bangerz Tour and, speaking to The Recovery podcast, she said it was an environment that left her feeling alienated, frustrated. Having recently had children, she felt divorced from the "highly sexualised" nature of the tour and struggled to reconcile her place within it.

"I was sort of like re-entering this phase of being a pop star again but not doing it on my terms anymore. I was supporting this girl who was much younger and more attractive than I felt," she said.

She started leaning on alcohol, abusing it, and cheating on her then-husband, Sam Cooper. Then, one night in California, came the tipping point.

"I remember being in LA," she said, "and thinking, like, 'None of this acting-out is working anymore. Maybe I should try heroin'," she said. "[I] knew that when that thought popped into my head it was time to confront my demons."

Lily Allen speaks about cheating on her husband with female escorts on The Project. Post continues below video.

Now 38, the singer first experienced the dark underbelly of the celebrity world when she was just a teen.

Allen always had a complicated relationship with alcohol and drugs. She started drinking as a teenager at boarding school, and while she didn't enjoy the feeling of being drunk, she enjoyed the attention that came with it.

"And I think I became addicted or co-dependent at that point," she said, "because I started getting my value from [the] attention of others and that is something that has played out until relatively recently, really."

Once she rose to fame in 2006 with the release of her debut albumAlright, Still, alcohol and drugs, particularly the prescription stimulant Adderall, offered an escape from the absurd tabloid criticism about her weight and singing ability. But it also deepened her feelings of worthlessness.

"I would spend my days, like, beating myself up and believing all of this stuff that was being written about me," she said, "and then I would, like, spend my nights proving it wrong in a hotel room with five other addicts."

Her relationship with the tabloid media during this time was fraught as well. In 2009 she obtained a court order to stop paparazzi following her around London.

"It's not a very nice feeling. Especially when you're in your early 20s, and you're still trying to figure out who you are in the world," she said to New York Times this week.

"From 18 to about four or five years ago just feels like a bit of a haze, because I was literally just off my face the whole time. I was using fame as well. That was an addiction in itself."

She's sober now. But along the path to recovery were tragedies that tested her resolve, two broken relationships and another that's helping her heal.

Lily Allen's loves and losses.

Just three months after Lily Allen's relationship with Chemical Brothers musician Ed Simons went public in 2007, Allen announced they were expecting a child.

But in January the following year, the 'Smile' singer shared that she had suffered a miscarriage.

They broke up shortly after, and Allen checked herself into a psychiatric ward. In July 2009, Allen began dating Sam Cooper, a builder and decorator.

On August 5, 2010, she announced they were expecting a son, due early in 2011.

But Allen experienced complications, including more than a week of heavy bleeding early in the pregnancy, and at the six-month mark, she contracted a viral infection that caused her to suffer a stillbirth.

In 2018 during in an interview for BBC Radio 4's Woman’s Hour , Allen opened up about the traumatic delivery of her little boy, who she and Cooper named George.

"I went into early labour and they put a stitch in my cervix to try to stop that from developing, and that lasted for the best part of a week," she said.

"The stitch broke, and I went into full-blown labour, and the baby was really, really small," she recalled. "And as I was delivering him, the doctors said, 'There was a pulse and now there no longer is.' The cord was wrapped around his neck and he was just too small."

"Because his skin wasn’t fully formed they couldn't [use] forceps [to] pull him out.

"So there was a period of about 12 hours of lying there with him deceased in between my legs," she shared. "I went into trauma, and I don’t think I’ll ever really recover from that."

In another interview with The Guardian, Allen described walking out of her house a few weeks later into "torrential, biblical rain", to take off all her clothes, lie naked on the ground and howl.

"I don’t even know where that came from, I just found myself there, outside," she said. "Despair. It was horrendous."

Allen's rainbow babies.

Soon after George's stillbirth, Allen and Cooper became engaged while on holiday in Bali and married in England in June 2011.

In November 2011, Allen gave birth to daughter Ethel. She was born needing surgery for laryngomalacia and was unable to feed properly for eight months.

In 2014, Allen said she felt like George was part of Ethel.

"I just think that he's a part of my eldest, really. If he hadn't died, it wouldn't have physically been possible for our eldest to be alive because I got pregnant with her so quickly," she told the Huffington Post.

"We've got a little stone in our garden with his name on. And lots of different things that I do, rituals, I have him in my mind."

Allen and Cooper's second daughter Marnie was born in 2013.