Lily Allen’s marriage — and subsequent split in 2024 — from Stranger Things alum David Harbour was the latest development in her dramatic love life.
The Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter has generated countless headlines for her two marriages — first to Sam Cooper and then to Harbour — as well as for her frank comments about her romantic prospects for the future.
“The dating scene is much harder as a 40-year-old woman with two teenage children than it is for a 34-year-old woman,” she admitted to Paper Magazine in October 2025. “It’s bitterly disappointing. There’s an element of humiliation and shame around it. The world doesn’t portray women of my age as being desirable.”
She went on, “[Dating] just feels like climbing up a mountain. But also, at the same time, I’m like, I don’t have to get involved with it. But something in me says that I do.”
Keep scrolling for a look back at Allen’s dating and marriage history.
Ed Simons
Shortly after the release of her debut single, “Smile,” Allen started dating Ed Simons, who is half of the electronic music duo Chemical Brothers. Allen’s spokesperson announced the singer was expecting her first child with Simons three months later.
“As the pregnancy is at a very, very early stage, the couple ask that you respect their privacy,” her representative told People in December 2007. “The couple will be making no further comment but they are obviously both thrilled by the news.”
It was reported in January 2008 that Allen suffered a miscarriage and her relationship with Simons ended soon after.
Liam Gallagher
Rumors swirled in the British press for nearly a decade that Allen hooked up with Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher on an airplane while he was still married to his ex-wife Nicole Appleton. (Gallagher and Appleton were married from 2008 to 2014, and they share a son, Gene Gallagher.)
Appleton seemingly lent credence to the accusations by tweeting in April 2018: “One day our paths will cross @lilyallen!”
Allen initially attempted to downplay the airplane hookup rumors when asked about them by The Guardian in May 2018.
“I mean, I haven’t said one thing [to suggest that]. I literally have never said anything.” she insisted. “Nine years ago, they first tried to print this story, and I didn’t say anything then. And now Nicole Appleton, bless her, she’s reacted to it, so that’s made it seem real. Now my Twitter feed is: ‘Oh, stupid attention seeker, she just wants another minute in the limelight.’ But I literally haven’t said anything. I haven’t even liked a tweet. Nothing.”
However, Allen eventually claimed in her memoir My Thoughts Exactly that she did hook up with Gallagher while they were traveling to the FujiRocks festival in 2009.
“We got hammered on the plane,” she recalled. “At some point Liam and I found ourselves together in the toilet doing something that he shouldn’t have been doing, and it wasn’t drugs. Then we were in a lie-down bed together. When we landed in Tokyo, Liam said, in his distinctive nasal twang, ‘What you doing now? Why don’t you come back to our hotel’ … I was like, ‘Yeah, OK.’”
Allen insisted that she was not aware that Gallagher was married until after they’d already hooked up in Tokyo.
“It wasn’t until the next day when he said something like, ‘No one can hear about this because of Nic,’ that I clocked he was married,” she wrote. “I knew [Liam’s brother] Noel [Gallagher] was married and I knew Liam had been married to Patsy Kensit. That was partly why I fancied him. I’d grown up an Oasis fan. I was 12 when he and Patsy Kensit were on the cover of Vanity Fair as the coolest couple.”
In her autobiography, the “LDN” musician described an awkward situation that took place months later when Gallagher surprised her on the phone with Appleton.
“Six months later I was in my car with my driver when the phone rang. . . It was Liam,’ she wrote in her memoir. “He sounded awful, like he’d been up all night. ‘Lil,’ he said. ‘I just need you to get on the phone. I’ve got Nic here. One of your mates is, like, trying to do a wind-up or something and saying that you and me had it off or whatever, and I need you to speak to Nic and say that it’s all bollocks.’”
Allen went on: “[I said,] ‘Oh, Liam, yes sure, it’s all bollocks. Let’s say it’s all bollocks — of course I’ll tell Nicole that it’s all bollocks if that’s what you want — and not think about it too much or even at all, and then maybe it will go away and not disrupt what really matters: The people we love and rely on.’”
Gallagher has never publicly commented on the allegations.
Sam Cooper
Allen started dating builder and decorator Sam Cooper around the same time as her alleged hookup with Gallagher in July 2009.
They announced they were expecting their first baby together in August 2010. After suffering extensive bleeding early in the pregnancy, Allen developed a viral infection in November 2010 that led to her son, George, being stillborn.
In 2018, Allen looked back on the trauma of losing George during an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour program.
“The hardest thing about that was losing a child, but there were complications with the actual delivery,” Allen remembered. “He was so small he actually got stuck halfway in and halfway out, so to speak, during the delivery, and because his skin wasn’t fully formed they couldn’t [use] forceps [to] pull him out.”
She further explained, “So there was a period of about 12 hours of lying there with him deceased in between my legs, which was incredibly [traumatic]. I went into trauma and I don’t think I’ll ever really recover from that.”
One month after the loss of their son, Allen and Cooper got engaged while on vacation in Bali. They tied the knot at St. James Church in Cranham, Gloucestershire, England, in June 2021, by which time Allen was once again pregnant. (Allen and Cooper welcomed daughter Ethel in November 2011, with their younger daughter, Marnie, arriving in January 2013.)
The couple split in 2015. Allen revealed during an interview with Vulture in 2018 that she “cheated on [her] husband.”
Reflecting on the events that led up to her split, she said: “I lost my sense of self. I lost my identity. I was being a bad mum. I was being bad at my job. I’d wake up on a tour bus in the middle of Wisconsin and be so hungover. I cheated on my husband. All I wanted to do was be with my kids. I wasn’t even making any money.”
Allen then admitted, “I lost my marriage, I lost my house, I lost my mind. I literally had to hit rock bottom and build myself back up.”
That same year, Allen elaborated on her infidelity by confirming via Instagram that she’d slept with female sex workers while touring in 2014 because she was “lost and lonely and looking for something.” Her confession caused a major media scandal in the U.K., though she downplayed the revelation during an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show.
“Because it was a woman, I felt like it wasn’t cheating. I was bonkers,” she said in September 2018.
David Harbour
Allen and Harbour went public in September 2019 and then made their red carpet debut at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in January 2020. Later that year, Us Weekly confirmed that they’d tied the knot after obtaining a marriage license in Las Vegas.
Harbour confirmed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2021 that he’d got engaged to Allen before the pandemic, though it was a conversation with the musician’s daughters that convinced him they needed to actually get married.
“We were riding around beginning of pandemic — she has two kids, these beautiful daughters, 8 and 9 — and we were riding bikes out in the country trying to figure out what we were gonna do for the next year or however long it was going to take,” he said. “And the little one was riding along and she was going like, ‘David, Dad, David, Dad.’ Because the ‘d’ got her confused. And the older one got very upset with that, which I understand, and was like, ‘He’s not our dad! He’s not our dad!’”
He went on, “The younger one was like, ‘Well, what is he? He’s kind of our dad.’ She’s like, ‘No, he’s not.’ ‘He’s kind of our stepdad.’ ‘No, he’s not.’ And she goes, ‘What is he?’ And she goes, ‘He’s just some guy in our lives!’ I was like, ‘I need to marry this woman’ because of the emotional fallout.’”
Amid reports that he’d split from Allen in December 2024, Harbour coyly addressed upheaval in his love life several months later.
“I’m protective of the people and the reality of my life. There’s no use in that form of engaging [with rumors] because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole,” Harbour told GQ Hype in April 2025.
Allen did not directly address her divorce in an October 2025 interview with British Vogue, though she did admit that she’d gone to some “some very, very bleak places” in the past few years.
On her 2025 album West End Girl, Allen hinted that infidelity may have played a role in the end of her marriage to Harbour. She subsequently confirmed to Vogue that her new songs were “inspired by what went on in the relationship,” though she cautioned: “That’s not to say that it’s all gospel.”
