Harry Styles Biography

Harry Styles is an English singer who was part of the “boy band” One Direction before he was a fashionista and screen actor.

While in One Direction, Styles was the mop-haired one with dimples who famously (and briefly) dated American singer Taylor Swift in late 2012.

Harry got his professional start when he auditioned as a solo act in 2010 for the talent show The X Factor. Although he didn’t make the cut, Styles was put together with four other solo artists and performed on the show as a group (the other four are Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson).

The group, dubbed One Direction, came in third in the talent contest, but producer Simon Cowell signed them to a record contract and they began recording in early 2011.

By 2012 the band had a contract in the U.S. with Columbia Records, a hit album called Up All Night and a number one single, “What Makes You Beautiful.” They went on to make pop music history, selling millions of records and performing around to world to enormous crowds.

When the group took an indefinite break in 2016, Styles began his solo career, and his self-titled debut album — just like the first four One Direction albums — debuted at the top of the charts (it included the single, “Sign of the Times”).

Styles had equal success with the 2019 album Fine Line (with its hit, “Watermelon Sugar”) and his 2022 album Harry’s House (with “As it Was”) won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal and Album of the Year.

Meanwhile, he’d begun his acting career, appearing in Dunkirk (2017, directed by Christopher Nolan) in a small role, followed by starring roles in Don’t Worry Darling (2022, with Florence Pugh and directed by Styles’s then-girlfriend, Olivia Wilde) and My Policeman (2022).