Originally appeared on E! Online
The story of Liam Payne’s life had seemingly entered a new chapter.
After a few months away from the public eye, the One Direction member shared with fans in July 2023 that he was six months sober following a 100-day stay at a treatment facility.
“I just needed to take a little bit of time out for myself actually because I kind of became somebody who I didn’t really recognize anymore,” he said in a video posted to YouTube. “And I’m sure you guys didn’t either.”
Payne had released a single, “Teardrops,” in March, his first new music in three years. Around that time he also shared a rare photo of 7-year-old Bear, his son with ex-girlfriend Cheryl Cole, the English singer having taken a turn for the private since his days as one-fifth of the most popular boy band on the planet.
But Payne’s story ended tragically and far too soon when he died Oct. 16 after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentine police confirmed to CNN. He was 31.
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Two hours before the news broke, he had shared a smiling selfie on Snapchat alongside his longtime girlfriend Kate Cassidy—both of them in swim gear—as well as other videos that whizzed around social media as fans grappled with him being here one minute and gone the next.
On Oct. 2 he had attended Niall Horan’s show in Argentina, fellow concertgoers filming him boppin’ along as his 1D mate performed the group’s song “Stockholm Syndrome,” a sign that their bond was still tight almost nine years since they’d last shared a stage.
Dave Benett/Getty Images for Annabel’s
Though 1D’s announced hiatus in 2015 had long since taken a turn for the permanent, Payne’s formative years recording and touring with Horan, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik (who left the group not long before the break) continued to define him in the public eye long after he embarked on a solo career.
Payne was only 14 when he first auditioned for The X Factor in 2008—and didn’t make it out of the Judges’ Houses round. When he went back two years later, again trying out as a solo artist, he ended up in 1D as orchestrated by judges Nicole Scherzinger, Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh.
“That feels like a different lifetime to me now, so much has happened since this band began,” he said in the group’s official autobiography, published in 2014. “Inevitably, because we’ve been quite successful, when I look back at my life it’s colored by the whole One Direction experience.”
Growing up with two older sisters in Wolverhampton in England’s West Midlands, the only son of Geoff and Karen Payne described himself as a rambunctious, active kid who “used to bounce off the walls at home a fair bit too.”
But while he became an athletic kid, enjoying everything from soccer to boxing, he was frequently sick for the first several years of his life and doctors ultimately discovered scarring on one of his kidneys.
“I effectively died as a baby,” Payne said. “I was born three weeks early and kept being ill. From the age of zero to 4 was always in hospital having tests done but they couldn’t find out what was wrong.”
Even as a grown man, he shared, “I have to be careful not to drink too much, even water, and I have to keep myself as healthy as possible.”
But he also sang from an early age, starting in choirs and crushing at karaoke with the full encouragement of his dad, who drove him to all his gigs (playing at local festivals, etc.) and helped him record his own CDs. And Geoff Payne kept trucking right along with his son after he was cut from The X Factor in 2008, the teen’s determination to make it happen for himself stronger than ever.
But while he became an athletic kid, enjoying everything from soccer to boxing, he was frequently sick for the first several years of his life and doctors ultimately discovered scarring on one of his kidneys.
“I effectively died as a baby,” Payne said. “I was born three weeks early and kept being ill. From the age of zero to 4 was always in hospital having tests done but they couldn’t find out what was wrong.”
Even as a grown man, he shared, “I have to be careful not to drink too much, even water, and I have to keep myself as healthy as possible.”
But he also sang from an early age, starting in choirs and crushing at karaoke with the full encouragement of his dad, who drove him to all his gigs (playing at local festivals, etc.) and helped him record his own CDs. And Geoff Payne kept trucking right along with his son after he was cut from The X Factor in 2008, the teen’s determination to make it happen for himself stronger than ever.
Ian Gavan/Getty Images
When Payne, Styles, Horan, Malik and Tomlinson all made it as far as they were going to go individually on the hit U.K. competition in 2010, it was Scherzinger who most resisted the idea of sending any of them home.
“They’re just too talented to get rid of,” she said in never-before-seen footage released in 2022. “They’ve got just the right look and the right charisma onstage. I think they’ll be really great in a boy band together. They’re like little stars. You can’t get rid of little stars, you know? So you put them all together.”
When Cowell waffled a bit about sending Payne through, as seen in the clip, Scherzinger insisted that “he’s better than anyone else.”
(Incidentally, Payne’s father also played a role: “I called my dad, I was like, ‘This is weird, I know I just told you I’m out but they want to put me in a boy band, like what do you think about it?'” he reminisced on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast in 2022. “He said, ‘Well, you can either be 100 percent of nothing or one-fifth of something.’ And I thought, Hmm, very clever, Geoffrey.”)
And with that, One Direction was off to the races, the lads—Tomlinson being the oldest, followed by Malik, Payne, Horan and Styles—doing the rest of their growing up as international sensations.
Which had its low points, Payne noting that sometimes the scrutiny, even from complete strangers online, could be hurtful. And he admittedly didn’t always have the tools to disregard what critics were saying.
“It’s a really fine line between getting too wrapped up in what’s going on and not being wrapped up enough in it,” he said on a June 2021 episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast. Sometimes it hurt, sometimes he laughed it off. But, he added, “I’ve gone through eras where I was a little clapback, attitude-driven youth….I was a bit mean and nasty at points.”
Karwai Tang/WireImage
He took to writing a note in his phone instead of firing off a tweet. “And then it gets all what you would tweet out but you don’t say it,” he said. “That was the best thing I ever did.”
But those were the things they don’t teach you when you’re first starting out.
“When we were 17, I thought the security guard was in charge of me,” Payne recalled. “I was like, ‘Can we leave the room?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh, OK then, not to worry, I’ll just stay here.’ That’s what it was like. So I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. There’s no guidebook. They don’t give you a little DVD on the way in, saying, ‘Here, you’re a pop star!'”
Eventually, he continued, “that becomes, like, an angry person, and I was, because there was points where it was toxic and it was difficult. Don’t get me wrong, we had the best time ever, we did, but there was moments, where…You don’t realize you have a choice at that point.”
On shows like The X Factor, you “want the dream,” Payne explained, “but you have to realize, there is a sacrifice for that.”
Which wasn’t to say he didn’t feel responsible for his own actions, he added, “being an alcoholic, doing whatever else, that was my choice. So it doesn’t have to be whiny, but I know it was a sacrifice to be here.”
Eventually, he continued, “that becomes, like, an angry person, and I was, because there was points where it was toxic and it was difficult. Don’t get me wrong, we had the best time ever, we did, but there was moments, where…You don’t realize you have a choice at that point.”
On shows like The X Factor, you “want the dream,” Payne explained, “but you have to realize, there is a sacrifice for that.”
Which wasn’t to say he didn’t feel responsible for his own actions, he added, “being an alcoholic, doing whatever else, that was my choice. So it doesn’t have to be whiny, but I know it was a sacrifice to be here.”
Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Disney
Payne, who at the time had recently ended his engagement to Maya Henry (they’d rekindle but break up again in 2022) and said he’d been sober for a month, talked about his renewed devotion to fitness. He shared that he had seen himself on TV performing on the BAFTAs earlier that year and didn’t look “how I wanted to look” after months of pandemic lockdown.
Hitting the gym again provided “the best outcome for me,” he said, “because I feel so much more secure in myself now and I feel like I know where I’m at again.” And once he was back at it, Payne continued, “I’m fairly good with keeping myself on the go with it…The only part of it for me was just alcohol, you can’t train and drink, you can’t do it all at once.”
“You’re either going to be a rock star,” he added, “or you’re going to be a star in the gym. That’s your choice.”
And in that case, having an addictive personality wasn’t the worst, Payne said, because “there’s a lot worse things to be addicted to than looking after yourself.”
Which is what he was trying to do when he checked into treatment in Louisiana, saying in his July 2023 video, “I kind of had to go away to get better.”
“I was in bad shape up to that point,” he explained, “and I was really happy more than anything when I arrived to kind of put a stopper on life and work. I didn’t have my phone for nearly 100 days. I didn’t connect with the outside world at all, and it was kind of prepping me for that moment, upon leaving—the hardest part was turning the phone back on.”
DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images
But, Payne continued, “It was a nice world to come back out to. Ever since then I’ve just kind of been trying to learn to get to know this new guy.”
The singer, who had started dating Cassidy in 2022, also thanked Bear and his son’s mum for giving him the freedom to go get well, which he simply had to do.
“There’s no point in trying to be a dad when you’ve got nothing to teach,” Payne said, “and I don’t think up until this point I really had much to say to him other than just caring for him and loving him very deeply, which are obviously the most important things. But I just kind of feel like I’ve got more of a grip on life now and everything that was kind of getting away from me, I’ve got more of a handle on it.”
And that’s what makes this story especially heartbreaking. For more memories, keep reading to see Payne’s life in pictures:
2010
2010 src=https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/z8.WD.f.95fTUGt17Bd9ig–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTE1NTE-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/e__181/2734f6181b1dea37537a8287e4151f9c>
Neil Mockford/FilmMagic
2010
2010 src=https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/7_Tx9I7ldIGMFuBTDOcVYg–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTYzNA–/https://media.zenfs.com/en/e__181/60d161d4b3c802fba4d09726aab8e2a9>
Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images
2011
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Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage
2012
2012 src=https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/o.sP.WHr_Ug5JewSftLrag–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTEzNDM-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/e__181/754560d7fbf96bd1c58c5d34325eeb44>
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2012
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Michael Kovac/WireImage
2012
2012 src=https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/VZCa6k15.Ic4w_qVJHy4cg–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTE1NTE-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/e__181/dc7997929adbd80142e23d7805e0e970>
Kevin Kane/Getty Images
2013
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David M. Benett/WireImage
2014
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Anthony Harvey/Getty Images
2014
2014 src=https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/3e2.RUJD2v_3ffEFyZvRcA–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTE0NDY-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/e__181/bf283b2d61b9c5cabac76fbb99fa56c5>
Jason Merritt/Getty Images
2015
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Dave J Hogan/Dave J Hogan/Getty Images
2015
2015 src=https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/J0W0DL186v8hO.Hz5Q1XHA–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTEzNDM-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/e__181/cdaa9c7e15f03650d9f31989d399aa65>
Karwai Tang/WireImage
2016
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Venturelli/WireImage
2017
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Marcus Ingram/Getty Images for iHeartMedia
2017
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Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images
2018
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Karwai Tang/WireImage
2018
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Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
2019
2019 src=https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/0L1QWb7ZHge.Lyw.lBd_8Q–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTcxMg–/https://media.zenfs.com/en/e__181/11436a18192c14902d46e182796d9fa0>
Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for ABA
2020
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Michael Sohn/AP/Shutterstock
2021
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EE/BAFTA/Shutterstock
2021
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Joe Maher/Getty Images
2022
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Karwai Tang/WireImage
2022
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JC Olivera/Getty Images
2023
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Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Atlantis The Royal
2023
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Dave Benett/Getty Images for Annabel’s
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