In her newly-released memoir, The Woman in Me, Britney Spears reveals the reason she’s been filmed talking in a British accent over the years.
Spears grew up in Kentwood, Louisiana and typically talks in a light Southern accent.
However, in numerous clips, captured either by the paparazzi or shared on her own social media channels, the “Toxic” singer breaks into an English accent. In the past, the outbursts have concerned the singer’s fans.
“According to my mother, my grandmother Lilian ‘Lily’ Portell was from an elegant, sophisticated family in London,” Spears, 41, writes in The Woman in Me.
“She had an exotic air about her that everyone commented on; her mother was British and her father was from the Mediterranean island of Malta.”
In 2008, The Times traced the singer’s ancestry back to Tottenham in North London, where her great-grandparents were married.
Britney Spears— (Getty Images)
Spears’s maternal great-grandfather, Edward Portell, had immigrated to the United Kingdom from Malta while the country was a colony of the British Empire.
During World War II, Lily met Spears’s grandfather Barney Bridges, an American GI, at a dance for the soldiers. The pair then emigrated back to his dairy farm in Louisiana.
“All I knew was that my grandmother was beautiful and I loved copying her British accent,” Spears writes. “Talking in a British accent has always made me happy because it makes me think of her, my fashionable grandmother. I wanted to have manners and a lilting voice just like hers.”
Last week, it was reported that The Woman in Me was accidentally put on sale in Mexico City ahead of its 24 October release.
Fans of the singer urged those who managed to purchase a copy of the memoir to “respect Britney’s work” and refrain from leaking it online.
Ahead of the book’s release, several bombshell claims have been made public with excerpts exclusively being published by People and Time magazine.
At one point in the book, Spears revealed she had an abortion during her four-year relationship with Justin Timberlake, from 1998 until 2002.
Elsewhere, the singer recalled auditioning to “rooms full of men” who looked her “up and down” before Spears signed her first record deal.
The Woman in Me is out now.
