It’s official: Coleen Rooney is entering the jungle.
The lineup for I’m A Celebrity was released last night – and we’re already excited.
Alongside Tulisa Contostavlos, Danny Jones, Alan Halsall, Oti Mabuse, Melvin Odoom, Barry McGuigan and Jane Moore, Rooney will be swapping her luxury lifestyle for several weeks in the Australian outback. Goodbye Louis Vuitton handbags, hello eating grubs for dinner.
Not that it’s likely to faze Rooney. Since emerging into the public eye aged 16, she’s weathered scandals, navigated marital difficulties and turned detective to root out leakers (yes, we’re talking about Wagatha Christie).
She’s a true survivor – and a hard-nosed negotiator. According to The Sun, she’s been paid a record £1.5m to appear on the show, making her its best-paid contestant ever.
With the show about to kick off, here’s what you need to know about her life.
Early days
Rooney was born in April 1986 in Liverpool, to Tony and Colette McLoughlin. Her father was a bricklayer who ran a boxing club; Rooney was the oldest of three children, and as a child, the family fostered, then adopted, another girl – her sister Rosie, who had Rett syndrome (a rare brain disorder that causes severe disabilities).
At 12, she met the man who would become her future husband, and catapult them both to stardom: Wayne Rooney, whose mother worked as a cleaner at the arts college Coleen attended. They started dating at 16, after both had left secondary school; she was, according to Wayne, “a goody who did her homework.”
“I desperately wanted to kiss her but I didn’t know how,” Wayne Rooney told Sue Evison for her biography England’s Hero: Wayne Rooney.
Shortly after they started dating, Wayne Rooney’s star began to rise: he secured a place at Everton, then at England. While Coleen was studying for her A-levels, he made his Engladn debut at 17 and proposed to her shortly after – on the forecourt of a BP garage.
“He was very nervous,” Coleen said later. “People think we are too young, but I don’t think we are. He is the person I love and want to stay with for the rest of my life.”
They married in Portofino, in Italy, on June 2008 – a wedding for which OK! paid a reported £2.5m for exclusive pictures and coverage. The pair moved into a new £1.3m mansion in Formby soon after.
Life as a WAG
Rooney’s soaring success as a footballer soon catapulted Coleen into a new world, one of unimaginable luxury – and press scrutiny. Rooney began appearing on newspapers around the world, as did a new label for herself and her fellow footballers’ wives and girlfriends: the WAG.
“Wayne has never looked for the spotlight,” Rooney told Vogue later. “He would have loved to just play football and not have the fame thing.” But she also opened up about her own fame: “when people say, ‘Oh, she’s only in the public eye because of Wayne,’ I’m like, ‘Yeah I am.’”
A women’s feature editor later told The Times that “Coleen is very shy, and at first she said she never wanted to become another Posh Spice. Her publicist and agent were merely trying to resist the tabloid onslaught and protect her.
“But then she was amazed that other girls were copying what she wore and began to glimpse the possibilities.”
A string of high-profile deals followed: she was paid £3m to front a campaign at Asda; in 2007, she released her autobiography, Welcome to My World. A four-book series called Coleen Style Queen followed.
Ever reserved, Rooney rarely talked to the press, but that didn’t stop news of multiple cheating scandals leaking to the media.
In 2004, the Sunday Mirror reported that Wayne Rooney had paid £140 for sex with a sex worker, Charlotte Glover, and give her his autograph as a “souvenir”. In 2009, while Rooney was pregnant with their son Kai, he was reported to have slept with another, Jenny Thompson: the latest in a long line of indiscretions.
That time, Rooney moved out of their shared home and in with her parents – but eventually forgave him. Their second son, Klay, was born in 2013, and their third, Kit, followed in 2016.
“Wayne's a great dad,” Rooney wrote later in her book My Account. “Every time he's gone off the rails, it's been a stupid, drunken, spur-of-the-moment thing... my message is if there's something to work at, if the love's still there, why would you throw that away? Mistakes have happened, but I've always known Wayne's loved me.”
They also had tragedy to contend with: Coleen’s sister Rosie died on 5 January 2013 at the age of 14, and Rooney has since spoken about how much it affected her and her family.
"She had bad stints before that where she'd been in hospital,” she told Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place podcast last year. “But she battled through it and she came out. A number of Christmases we spent in hospital. Her immune system went down in winter, she got chest infections.
"Knowing doesn't take away the pain but it can help prepare yourself in a way that you know it's going to happen. It's going to happen to everyone, but at that early age it was hard to accept.”
Of her parents, she added, “they struggled... they've always put on a brave face on for everyone else, but the amount of times, I've heard them crying going to bed at night and it's not nice to hear.”
Wagatha Christie
It’s been told a thousand times, but the story still bears retelling. Though Rooney was a well-known public figure by this time, she really caught the nation’s attention in 2019 when an Instagram post she wrote went viral.
Aged 37 at the time, Rooney had become increasingly suspicious that a number of stories she’d shared on her private Instagram account had leaked to The Sun – an outlet that the Rooneys had no relationship with.
To figure out who was behind the leaking, she changed her settings and leaked a number of fake stories to a variety of different people she suspected of being behind them. Her conclusion: it was Rebekah Vardy, the wife of footballer Jamie.
Hence, the iconic tweet: “it’s....... Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
And hence the social media firestorm that followed. The post went viral and the saga was quickly dubbed ‘Wagatha Christie’; Vardy strongly denied the claims. Arguing with Rooney, she told the Mail, would “be like arguing with a pigeon. You can tell it that you are right and it is wrong, but it’s still going to shit in your hair”.
“I felt like she was in the same world as me,” Rooney told Vogue later about her relationship with Vardy. “She was in the public eye. I thought she would be protective over that kind of thing.”
“I’ve never fell out with another partner before,” she continued. “We would associate... because our husbands had played for England together. But she doesn’t live round here. She wasn’t a friend. I’ve never socialised with her.”
Vardy sued for defamation; the case eventually went to court in 2020 amid a blizzard of newspaper headlines.
“It was so difficult in that courtroom,” Rooney later told Vogue. “especially watching her on the stand. It was quite painful. I felt uneasy.”
Vardy’s claim was eventually dismissed, and Rooney was awarded costs by the court – including £800,000 to be paid immediately.
“The relief was everything,” she added. “It was quite surreal how many people followed it. Not just footballers or the girls. It felt like everyone was reading about it. All ages, all types.”
Four years later, she’s appeared in a documentary series about the case, released a book detailing her side of the story, My Account
In it, she spoke of wanting to pursue “new projects” in the future – clearly, I’m A Celeb is just the first step.
I’m A Celebrity will air on ITV from November 17
