Katie Melua was born in Glasgow, Scotland, the daughter of an Italian family who migrated to Britain. She is one half Italian. She attended the Catholic Church and has said that, while being very passionate about her religion, she is also proud of her mixed British heritage. She is the daughter of a musician and an opera singer, and grew up singing in her family’s home.
Katie Melua was an only child who enjoyed reading as well as art. She is known to have taken an interest in drawing as early as kindergarten, and continued to do so into secondary school. She later trained as a chef and restaurant porter before going to drama school in London, where she gained a diploma in voice and movement. It is thought that her early love of acting may have been influenced by seeing Indian plays and movies, particularly sepia and black and white films from the early nineteen hundreds, which featured dark-skinned, female performers.
When Katie was studying vocal performance at college in Scotland, she met and fell in love with the lead singer of one of the largest Scottish pop bands of the day, John Butler. The two started dating for a time, but broke up in 1996. They reconciled and were together until September 1997, when Butler died of cancer. Katie later moved to Northern Ireland, where she worked as a chef and restaurant porter, but she always retained her love of theatre. When she was twenty, she went to York to study drama, where she discovered a theatre group based in the City, which became the foundation for what is known today as the Katie Melua Arts Centre.
Katie Melua’s first and last jobs were as a secretary and bookkeeper, before she moved into acting, which led to several more roles on stage and later on television, including a role as a maid in a period piece for British Broadcasting Corporation. She was then cast as a spy in a fantasy series for Sky, before landing the lead role in a period drama for BBC One in 2021. That same year, she appeared in the film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a historical romance written by Charles Dickens. For her final notable role, she starred as a mermaid in the award winning film Finding Nemo, alongside Ellen DeGeneres. She has also appeared in several independent films and one high budget movie, called The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of Monkey Fist.
Two of her three albums, Katy Lied and Pink Moon, have achieved success in the United Kingdom and the United States, while several other music artists in the country and abroad have enjoyed great success. In addition to having the best-selling female artist of all time, Katie Melua has inspired a variety of other musicians, including the Backstreet Boys, New Kids on the block, Coldplay, Weezer, Rihanna, Macy Gray, Ashanti and Macy Gray, to name a few. Other names that may be familiar to fans of hers include James Blunt, Jimmy Page, Kate Moss, David Gilmour and Gary Barlow. While this is an eclectic list, it at least gives an idea of the incredible career that has spanned half a decade, since her first album.
When it comes to Katie Melua, one thing is certain: she is an entertainer that understand how to sell herself, her songs and her voice. For anyone who appreciates originality and talent, then there is no doubt that she is a talented live and on-stage performer that everyone should be listening to. Her two previous albums, Katy Lied and Pink Moon, have proved to be commercially successful, but it is her third album, Meet Me in the Morning, which really set her on the path to stardom. With both singles, “I’m a Believer” and “Hollywood,” and the video for “I’m a Believer,” Katy andkatie has managed to not only take the world by storm, but to give fans of the original hip-hop and pop an all new to listen to what they previously thought was just good, original music.
