People PEOPLE Olivia Rodrigo

OBSESSED! ALL ABOUT OLIVIA RODRIGO Her Life: Child Star to Chart-Topper ⋆ Style Evolution ⋆ Inside the Tour: A 26-Page Album PLUS Spilling Her Guts! Olivia’s Exclusive People Interviews…

Before she performs “Teenage Dream” during her Guts World Tour, Olivia Rodrigo usually shares a little bit of teenage reality from her past. She composed the ballad “a few days before my 19th birthday,” she says while sitting at the piano. When am I going to stop being wise beyond my years/And just start being wise? goes the song. At the time she wrote it, she admits, “I was so afraid of growing up.” Now, having turned 21 in February, she assures her fans, many of whom might be at a point to feel something similar, that “growing up is f---ing amazing. It’s nothing to be scared of.” With two hit albums, armloads of awards and a mutual admiration society that includes generations of rock, alt and pop luminaries…

Two years after her breakout No. 1 hit “Drivers License” made her a superstar, Olivia Rodrigo refused to take her foot off the gas. After three Grammy Awards and multiplatinum sales for her debut LP, Sour, and more than 1 billion Spotify streams to her credit, the actress-singer unleashed her second album, Guts, a pop-punk masterpiece fueled by heartbreak, insecurities and public growing pains. In 2023 Rodrigo spoke with People about negotiating fame and finding peace in the spotlight. How did you approach making your second record after having such life-changing success with Sour? For the first few months of writing Guts, I was dealing with a lot of noise in my head about whether it was going to be good enough or whether I could ever top what…

IF OLIVIA RODRIGO’S PARENTS had to pinpoint exactly when they knew their daughter was destined for the spotlight, they might say it was a day when Olivia was around 4 years old. Left alone for a few minutes with some Tinkertoys, the preschooler immediately built her own microphone stand. “I guess that was a sign!” her mother told Elle. There would be many signs. Born on Feb. 20, 2003, Rodrigo was raised in the SoCal suburb of Temecula. An only child—though for a time she shared a room with the family’s pet snake Stripes—her gift for self-expression was nurtured by parents Chris and Jennifer, a marriage-and-family therapist and an elementary school teacher. “I feel like they’re a pretty accurate representation of who I am,” she said of her parents, and…

OLIVIA RODRIGO SPENT MUCH of her tween years living a Hannah Montana-style double life. By day she was a student at the suburban Murrieta elementary school, where her mother taught. But nights and weekends she was off to Los Angeles to attend film and television auditions. The drive was always long, and the tryouts often resulted in disappointment. Then, at age 10, she booked her first lead role. She would be the title character in the 2015 direct-to-video movie An American Girl: Grace Stirs Up Success. The tale of a young baking enthusiast who sweeps MasterChef Junior didn’t make Olivia a household name, but it set her on her way. A bigger break came in 2016 when 13-year-old Olivia debuted in her starring role as Paige Olvera on Bizaardvark—a Disney…

OLIVIA RODRIGO was on a soundstage in Utah filming the second season of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series in January 2021 when she learned her blistering post-breakup power ballad “Drivers License” was the No. 1 song in the country. It was her first single—and it had been out only a week. She made a beeline for the studio bathroom to call her producer and cowriter Daniel Nigro. Her mother had dropped her off at his cozy home studio in L.A.’s Highland Park one day the previous year, and the pair had been inseparable creative partners ever since. Nigro was a veteran of the pop-punk band As Tall as Lions and had worked with singers including Sky Ferreira and Caroline Polachek, but that hadn’t prepared him for anything…