Facts about Britney Spears
Britney Spears Biography
Britney Spears was only 17 when she reached #1 on the U.S. pop music charts with her 1999 debut album …Baby One More Time.
Her catchy tunes and sex appeal made Spears one of America’s biggest pop stars, and she became a near-constant presence on MTV, radio broadcasts and magazine covers around the world.
Britney Spears’s second album, Oops!…I Did It Again, was released in May of 2000 and went gold in its first week. In 2003 she released In the Zone, but by then her personal life was getting more press than her singing career.
On January 3, 2004, Spears married childhood friend Jason Alexander (not the Jason Alexander of Seinfeld), then had the marriage annulled the same day. Later in the year she married Kevin Federline, a professional dancer whose claim to fame was fathering two children with Moesha star Shar Jackson.
Britney Spears and Federline had two sons, Sean (b. September 14, 2005) and Jayden (b. September 12, 2006), but the couple divorced in 2007.
That year Spears was in the gossip columns on a weekly basis and made headlines by shaving her head, entering rehab, and, after repeated missteps with the courts, losing custody of her children to Federline. With very little publicity, she released Blackout, her fifth studio album, in November 2007.
Because of her mental health issues, she lost control of her estate and all her financial assets, as her father became her legal conservator in 2008. In 2009 she seemed to get her performing mojo back, launching a world tour, making a guest appearance on the TV show Glee in 2010, and settling back into life as a major pop performer.
As the conservatorship continued, a fan-created “Free Britney” movement (#FreeBritney) popped up on social media. After 13 years, that conservatorship ended in 2021. The next year she married Sam Asghari, a dancer she met on the set of a music video in 2016; she was 40 and he 28 when they married. They divorced in 2023.
Spears released two singles in 2023, “Mind Your Business” (with will.i.am) and a duet with Elton John of his early tune “Hold Me Closer.”
Later that year her autobiography was published. The Woman in Me was released in October of 2023 and sold over a million copies the first week in the U.S.
Despite the various contretemps, Britney Spears continued as one of the best-selling album artists of the early 2000s; by 2023, she had 42 million Instagram followers. Her other albums include Circus (2008), Femme Fatale (2011), Britney Jean (2013) and Glory (2016).
Extra credit
Britney Spears was in the cast of the Disney Channel’s The Mickey Mouse Club during its 1993 and 1994 seasons. Future pop stars Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and J.C. Chasez of the band ‘N Sync got their starts on the same show (Spears and Timberlake were romantically linked on and off from 2000-2003)… She starred in the 2002 teen road-trip film Crossroads. In that film the younger version of her character, Lucy, was played by her sister, Jamie Lynn Spears, star of the cable TV comedy Zoey 101… The wedding ceremony for Britney Spears and Kevin Federline was held on September 18, 2004, but papers formalizing the wedding weren’t filed until October 7th… After Spears filed for divorce, Federline was nicknamed “Fed-Ex” by the press… Britney Spears’s middle name is often incorrectly reported to be “Jeau” rather than “Jean.”