Halliwell 'chanelled grief into fame'

Rex Features

Geri Halliwell has revealed that her father's death spurred her to success.

The former Spice Girl admitted that she found it difficult to express her grief following her father's death, forcing her to channel all of her energy into her pop career.

"Sometimes I don't think I would have been famous if it wasn't for my father's death because [of] the pain of it," she told Piers Morgan on his Life Stories show.

"It was so painful and in the western world, when somebody dies, we don't have that, we're so formal nobody knew how to comfort me and I didn't know how to express it either.

"So I just turned all that pain into, 'Right, I'm going to make it' - and it wasn't until I left the band, I think that's when I started to really feel how much I missed him."

Halliwell, 37, also spoke on the programme about wearing her infamous Union Jack dress at the BRIT Awards in 1997.

She said: "On one hand I was going, 'Wow, everyone is looking at my dress, isn't that fantastic?' But then I'm quite mindful that there are four other girls standing next to me."