Lily Allen laughs when she reads gossip

The 25-year-old British singer has come to accept that she has absolutely no control over her public persona. She insists nobody knows the real her, and she is happy to let people write whatever they want about her because that helps keep her true personality a secret.

"Whatever I do, whether it`s going to the supermarket, or a nightclub, people think they know me, but the reality is they don`t know me at all," she explained.

"What they know is something they`ve read in a newspaper, written by someone who has never met me. Lily Allen is a person that people don`t know, she`s a character I have no control over, so I laugh about it because it`s nothing to do with me - except that my face is the one that goes with it."

While Lily finds it easy to ignore things that are said about her now, she admits she once struggled to cope with the constant criticism she faces every day. She says she started to believe little comments about what she was wearing or how much she weighed until she took a step back and realised it was all a "game".

"I suppose if you`re slightly lacking in self-confidence you take these bits of information and they become fact pretty quickly," she said on British television show Lily Allen: In Confidence.

sections: Celebrities