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Prologue: Work Hard, Play Hard, Be Kind
Harry Styles didn’t have a showbiz upbringing. He didn’t have music lessons or dance lessons, and he went to a normal comprehensive school, yet he is now one of the most famous recording artists in the world.
He has gone from fronting a band at school to The X Factor to huge success with One Direction (aka 1D), and now he’s acing it as a solo artist and movie actor. His astronomical rise to stardom can’t just be down to his good looks (although, let’s face it, they are good), and that leads us to the question: What’s so special about Harry?
Of his success, Harry told Another Man magazine, “If you can step outside of the craziness and appreciate it for the fact that it’s extraordinary, see it as this amazing thing for a second, it’s all right. If you just think that’s how life is, that’s when you lose touch. It’s good to have people who can tell you you’re an idiot.”
We’re not going to call Harry an idiot (how ridiculous!), but we are totally going to delve into the life of one of the sweetest guys in showbiz; the man whose motto is “Work hard, play hard, be kind.” What was his childhood like? What kind of teen was he? How did it feel to be on The X Factor? Has fame really not changed him at all? And what the heck is it that he loves so much about being naked?!
Let’s find out, shall we?
Chapter 1: Just a Normal Kid
It was close to midnight on Monday, January 31, 1994. Twenty-six-year-old Anne Styles clutched her bump and panted in pain, while her husband, Des, thirty-five, parked the car as fast as he could at the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, Worcestershire, England. Their little girl, Gemma, who was three at the time, was completely unaware that she would soon have a new baby brother or sister.
Back at the hospital, things were not quite so calm. The midwife took one look at Anne and knew that this was not going to be a long labor. Anne and Des were rushed into a delivery room where, at six minutes past midnight on Tuesday, February 1, Anne gave birth to a healthy baby boy.
“We only just made it in time!” Des later said.
After some discussion, they settled on the name Harry Edward for their new baby boy.
A retired ambulance worker also named Harry Styles later claimed that Harry was named after him. He told WalesOnline that he had looked after Anne when she felt ill at a pop concert in Birmingham while she was heavily pregnant with Harry. Apparently, she saw his name badge and said, “You’re quite nice. If it’s a boy I’m going to call him Harry.”
Whether that’s true or not, it’s impossible to think of the Harry Styles we know and love as having any other name: Edward Styles just doesn’t have the same ring to it (although we can sort of see him as an Eddie).
Harry was, unsurprisingly, a gorgeous baby. Early photos of him show an almost unbearably cute little boy with straight blond hair and big blue eyes (the dark curly hair and green eyes came later), and a huge, playful grin. He was still only a baby when the Styles family moved to Holmes Chapel, a village twenty-one miles south of Manchester.
“Not much happens there,” Harry later said during his X Factor audition. “It’s picturesque, but quite boring.” Perfect, in other words, for a young family. Even now Harry goes back home if he needs to escape.
“My parents still live where I grew up, so that’s one of the places where I feel like I disappear the most, if that’s what I’m in need of,” he told Another Man. “I go back to Cheshire a lot and walk around the same fields, and it’s one of the things that isn’t going to change, no matter what happens. I’m lucky that I still have a base up there.”
At the age of two, little Harry was enrolled at the local Happy Days Club & Nursery School, where he went while his parents were at work. (Anne worked in an office, and Des worked for financial companies.) As Harry later confirmed in One Direction’s book, Dare to Dream, “They were happy days, to be fair.”
By all accounts Harry was a good boy, always smiling, playing with his toys, painting or drawing. At home, while he liked the music that his dad would play – Elvis Presley, Queen, and The Beatles, usually – there was no sign at this early stage that he would follow a musical path himself. He was just a normal, smiley kid.
The only inkling that he might have what it took to go far was that he was always willing to try something new. If the caregivers who ran Happy Days suggested a new activity, he would happily join in and do his best. There’s also the fact that he was a total charmer from day one – that probably helped. He would even share his pacifier with the family dog, a border collie mix called Max. Gross, yes . . . but oh so cute!
When Harry was four he left Happy Days and started in the reception class at Hermitage Primary School. He was a happy, boisterous child, and it was at primary school that his love of performing first began to come to light. On hot days he would entertain parents picking up their kids by standing up in his seat in the back of the car and performing for them through the open window.
This led to a love of acting in school plays, and lead roles beckoned. Would you like to see a six-year-old Harry Styles wearing his big sister’s tights and a headband with glued-on ears in one of his primary-school productions? Course you would! Search “Harry Styles Barney the Mouse” on YouTube and marvel at the cuteness.
This love of performing carried on till the end of his time at Hermitage Primary. In one of his school’s newsletters it was noted, “We all remember Harry for a fantastic performance as the Pharaoh (‘Elvis’) in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in Year 6.”
“Even then he had that sort of magnetism that made people just want to watch him,” his sister, Gemma, told Another Man magazine. “He made people laugh. Babies still tend to stare at him now – it’s kind of weird.”
She also went on to add, “He didn’t find it difficult to make friends.” And he was friends with girls as well as boys.
“I wasn’t one of those boys who thought girls were smelly and didn’t like them,” he has said. “I was kind of friends with everyone.”
His first crush was on a little girl called Phoebe – the daughter of one of Anne’s friends. Despite the fact that he gave her a teddy bear (cute!), she wasn’t interested.
His best friend, Will Sweeny, told the Daily Star, “I’ve known him since he was four years old. I know it sounds funny, but even in primary school he had a few girls on the go. From Year 4, when he was about ten, Harry started with proper girlfriends. He just had this unbelievable way with girls all his life . . .”
Overall, little Harry seemed to lead a charmed existence.
“He would do what he wanted, but often it seemed that what he wanted was to make other people happy,” said Gemma. Whether this was pretending to be a whole class of students so Gemma could play being the teacher, or getting so overexcited at the prospect of giving his mom a present that he blurted out what she was about to unwrap, he liked to see people smile.
But Harry’s time at primary school wasn’t always happy. Behind the scenes, his parents were having troubles. His dad, Des, described what he remembers as “the worst day of my life” to the Daily Record.
“Harry was only about seven when I sat them [Harry and Gemma] down and told them I was leaving,” he said. “Generally, you wouldn’t see him cry as much as maybe some kids do – he wasn’t generally emotional or a crybaby – but he cried then.”
For two years after that Des slept in the spare
room and the family tried to struggle on, but eventually Harry’s parents made the difficult decision to part for good.
“It was quite a weird time,” said Harry in Dare to Dream. “I guess I didn’t really get what was going on properly. I was just sad that my parents weren’t going to be together anymore.”
“Of course, I missed him and Gemma,” said Des.
“It was tough. I used to feed him every night at half ten, change his nappy, put him to bed when he was a baby, and then I was no longer living with them.”
After the split, Anne was briefly married to a man called John Cox, the landlord of a pub in Northwich, Cheshire, England. The family lived there for a few years, then when Anne and John divorced they moved back to Holmes Chapel, and Harry started in Year 7 at Holmes Chapel Comprehensive School. Gemma remembers Harry’s teachers being surprised that this confident, cheeky boy was her brother. While she was painfully shy and a straight-A student, Harry was a joker.
Now a teacher herself, Gemma wrote in Another Man magazine, “He was talkative and very distracting – not ideal for a productive lesson.”
Harry wasn’t a bad student, though. He loved sports – especially soccer (he was a goalie for his local Holmes Chapel Hurricanes team), badminton, and cricket – and he usually earned Bs for his work, despite a lack of confidence. According to Gemma, he always felt like he had to keep up with her. Anne would often quietly ask Gemma to help Harry study for exams, because they stressed him out so much.
“I could never fathom how he had a confidence problem,” wrote Gemma. “I would have traded my As for his Bs and charisma in a heartbeat.”
It was around this time that Anne started seeing a new man: Robin Twist. Harry had always liked Robin, so he was delighted when one evening, while Anne and Robin were watching TV, Robin made the spur-of-the-moment decision to propose. Who needs a romantic location like Paris or New York when you have a sofa, a TV, and each other? It’s easy to see where Harry gets his down-to-earth attitude from.
Anne and Robin were married in 2013, during a break from Harry’s hectic touring schedule with One Direction. Harry was thrilled and honored when the man who had helped raise him from the age of seven invited him to be best man. Anne looked beautiful in a floor-length ivory dress with a bouquet of white roses.
“He hardly left his mum’s side and she looked really proud of him,” a guest told the Sunday Mirror. “He couldn’t stop smiling. He sipped champagne and chatted to everyone.”
Making his best-man speech was, Harry said, “the most nerve-wracking thing I’ve ever done,” but of course he pulled it off, making all the guests both laugh out loud and get teary-eyed, as all good speeches should.
Harry and Robin had a close relationship. Sadly, Robin passed away in June 2017 after a long battle with cancer.
Around the same time that Robin and Anne met and started seeing each other, Harry was also entering the world of relationships.
“I had a few girlfriends here and there when I was really young, but I didn’t have an actual girlfriend until I was twelve,” Harry told The Sun. “Then I went out with a girl called Emilie, and for quite a long time considering how young we were. She’s still a good friend now.
“I was also with a girl called Abi,” he went on. “I guess you could say she was my first serious girlfriend.”
Harry’s best friend, Will Sweeny, told Sugarscape, “[Harry’s] girlfriends were long term, for like a year, year and a half. He was dead caring to them too; he’d never cheat or mess them around. He talked about how a girl seemed like a nice person, not what her body was like. It’s what’s inside the person that matters to Harry.”
When Harry was fourteen he started a Saturday job at a local bakery, W. Mandeville, in Holmes Chapel. As well as serving customers, he would wash the floor, clean up in the back, wash the trays, and clean the counter. Every day he would have a brunch pasty (that’ll be bacon, cheese, and beans. In pastry. The boy has taste), and a cake – definitely one of the perks of working in a baker’s – and all day long he would, according to manager Simon Wakefield, charm the customers.
“He was the most polite member of staff we’ve ever had,” he told the Mirror. “Customers really took a shine to him. The shop suddenly had an influx of girls when Harry worked here. Sometimes there would be twelve of them pouring in at one time.”
According to Simon, everyone in the shop could tell that Harry was going places.
“There was always a good atmosphere when he was around,” Simon told the BBC. “He used to burst into song in front of the staff. We always knew he had it in him.”
Harry took his GCSEs in the summer of 2010. He did brilliantly, gaining twelve A* to C grades, and he decided to take A levels in Law, Sociology, and Business, with a vague plan to become a lawyer.
A certain TV show put an end to that idea, though. Harry didn’t know it yet, but the performing, the singing, the charm, and the charisma that had been the bedrock of his whole childhood were about to change his life forever . . .
