![]() ![]() And, you know, I’m thankful to that person.” And that just made me determined to go and work more. And I don’t know why he didn’t want his card back?” She laughs. “I won’t say his name because he’s actually still very influential in the industry today,” she explains, “but I had a meeting with him and he said, ‘I don’t like any of these songs.’ He took me to the CD store, threw down his credit card, said, ‘Get anything you want – go get inspired,’ and walked out. She recalls feeling “completely belittled and discouraged” when she first started, and remembers one incident when, aged 16, she played her demos to a music exec. There are other times when she’s had to fight to be taken seriously. “When didn’t understand the Phoenix record, I just was really confused, because I was like, ‘I’ve given everything.’ So, I just simply went to people that did understand it.” It spawned her biggest hits to date: “Your Song”, “Anywhere”, and “Let You Love Me”. “I’m just happy I didn’t give up on that vision,” she says. She signed to Atlantic Records in 2016, and six years after her debut album, released its follow-up, the aptly named Phoenix. “I was put in unfortunate circumstances where my specific vision just didn’t match theirs,” Ora says about that time. It happened to be Craig David’s “Where’s Your Love”, released in 2008. “I don’t think they ever thought it’d be a career for me.” She worked in a shoe shop on the Portobello Road, earning £80 a week, lived at home, and was an intern at a recording studio in Ladbroke Grove, where she managed to get her voice on a demo. “I said endlessly to my parents growing up, ‘I want to be a singer’, ‘I want to do music’, ‘I want to be an entertainer,’” says Ora, who left school at 16. She was named Rita after Rita Hayworth, one of Besnik’s favourite actresses. She comes from showbiz stock: her paternal grandfather, Besim Sahatçiu, was an award-winning Kosovan-Albanian director of theatre and film. ![]() Vera and Ora’s dad Besnik, a pub owner in Kilburn, scraped together the money to send her to the private Sylvia Young Theatre School. Ora has always aimed to provide for her family “as they have for us”, she says, and “to create a better life for me and them”. A stigma that I really am making it my mission to break.” And I think there’s often this stigma around refugees. “And for the rest of my life, I will endlessly feel passionate about refugees because I am one, and I will always be one. “My parents came to the UK for us – so we could be raised in a safer environment,” says Ora, who is a Unicef UK ambassador, focusing on their refugee work. The UK’s attitude towards refugees hasn’t much improved since Ora’s family arrived 30 years ago just a few weeks after we talk, 27 refugees will drown in the Channel trying to reach Britain, and the government will respond by promising tougher measures rather than safe passage. Her Damien Hirst “butterfly circle painting”, a gift from the artist that “got dropped” in transit, hangs on the wall despite the slightly smashed frame. Ora leads me into the living room, then a snug room, which is lavishly furnished and has nick-nacks from the Portobello Road market near to where she grew up. From the outside, it looks like something out of Hammer House of Horror – but the inside has been freshly renovated. Dressed in plain jeans and an open-neck shirt, she’s warm and unguarded beneath that public mask she seems far less brassy and tough. She shows me round her north London mansion, a listed building complete with a blue plaque. In person, Ora is so luminous, she looks like the embodiment of a Touche Eclat pen. “But you know, sometimes, I’m like, ‘Who the f*** is that?’” Mind you, she did have a 38 per cent accuracy rate last season – far higher than the others. No doubt Ora, who put forward Alan Partridge and Austin Powers as potential contestants in series two, will again have some bizarre guesses. ![]() Though acting might not be her strongest suit – she played Christian’s sister in the pilloried Fifty Shades of Grey films, and the Artful Dodger in Twist, a painful modern version of the Dickens classic – she is good at being herself onscreen: playful, quick, unselfconscious. “It was honestly the most jaw-dropping thing I have experienced.” She is supremely entertaining on the show. “I can’t even tell you what just happened to me on this last filming that we just did,” she says with a laugh. “It’s insane.” The new third series will include a bagpipe, a traffic cone, a robobunny and a stack of doughnuts. “It’s as crazy as it looks on TV,” says Ora. ![]()
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