They’re stars, they’re famous, and they have money. And what better thing for stars with money to do than to engage in a little gambling. After all, if you’ve got a big bankroll then you stand to win a lot of money through casino games or sports betting and also stand to have lots of fun watching the bets prevail in the process.
Britney Spears was once struggling from gambling addiction. She was an avid gambler of cockfighting in Lafayette, Louisiana, the cockfighting capital of the United States. "My parents took me to cockfights when I was a little girl, That was my reward for doing well at my dancing lessons. There was always lots of other kids there. We used to draw in the dirt with chicken feathers. It was real family entertainment.” said Britney Spears.
Her leisure time was turned into obsession on cockfights, a practice she continued after success had taken her far from her Kentwood, Louisiana, home. Betting on cockfighting, she explained to startled Hollywood friends, was a way of "keeping it real" and maintaining a connection to her roots. Besides, "that's what we do back home. We're country”.
In addition, there were news that spreads all over the Internet right now is that the pop star has been partying hard with Paris Hilton in Vegas, but she may be doing more than strip teases in Sin City. Rumors are that she was also in Vegas this past week working out a 20 week deal that could net Britney more than $15 million. Britney Spears plans to use the money to buy a home in Florida after she sells her Malibu home that she shared with her ex-husband Kevin Federline.
About Britney Spears: A trained dancer and capable singer who wanted a shot at singing, dancing and acting and had the determination and stamina to get to the top, Spears started her career in the entertainment industry early, too early in fact for producers of the revamped “Mickey Mouse Club” who turned down the talented young girl because of her age when she first auditioned in 1990. In 1997, Spears signed with Jive Records, beginning the partnership that would make her a household name. She toured the malls of America a la teen pop star Tiffany in 1998, getting her image into the minds of the people while getting her promo tape into their stereos.
Her debut single “…Baby One More Time” was a smash in the last days of 1998, thanks in part to the precocious, provocative schoolgirl-uniform sporting music video that accompanied the catchy and oddly edgy tune. While the fresh-faced teen sensation improbably crooned “My loneliness is killing me”, audiences of all ages were transfixed, from the middle-aged man staring at the singer’s short plaid kilt and midriff-baring blouse, to the 7-year-old girl hopping around in the playground, strangely pleading “Hit me baby, one more time.” Spears’ debut album went multi-platinum while her single stayed at the top of the charts in the first months of 1999.
Appearances on myriad specials and awards shows and a guest stint on the ABC sitcom “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” helped keep her in the minds and hearts of the public, and when she released her follow-up effort “Oops!… I Did It Again” in 2000. Though potential roles in the TV series “Dawson’s Creek” and the feature “Scary Movie” (2000) came to naught reportedly due to her busy schedule, new projects with Spears’ name attached sprung up frequently.
Rumors of her co-starring with Ricky Martin in a sequel to the 1987 romantic hit “Dirty Dancing” weren’t realized, but the singer/dancer made a major impression on television with a second erotically charged performance on the MTV Music Video Awards, undulation with an albino python to her song “I’m a Slave For U” and a saucy live concert, “Britney Spears Live in Las Vegas” in 2001 that aired on HBO, a production that demonstrated her adult sex appeal as much as it did her propensity to lip-synch.
Not satisfied with just conquering the music market, Spears tried her hand at publishing, co-authoring with her mother Lynne the autobiographical tome “Britney Spears’ Heart to Heart” in 2000 and the novel “A Mother’s Gift” in 2001, the later of which was turned into the ABC Family Channel telepic “Brave New Girl” in 2004, which Spears and her mother executive produced.
The wild child beneath the surface was bubbling over into her public persona, with the mainstream and tabloid press endlessly chronicling every juicy aspect of her behavior–which allegedly included late night partying and hook-ups with celebrity lotharios Fred Durst and Colin Farrell; the dam seemingly broke loose in January of 2004, when the singer shocked her fans with a surprise marriage to her childhood friend Jason Alexander (not the much-older “Seineld” actor of the same name) in an apparently booze-fueled New Year’s Eve wedding in Las Vegas, something she called “a joke that had gone too far.”
The marriage was annulled within 55 hours (with a lucrative payoff to Alexander), but that didn’t stop Spears’ shocking second rush to the altar later that same year, this time to dancer Kevin Federline (yet another a source of controversy, as Federline was an expectant father invloved in a relationship with actress Shar Jackson–who’d already bore him one child–at the start of their romance). Their engagement was announced in June, with plans for a fall 2004 wedding.
Somewhere between romances, Spears continued to self-promote with faux-relevatory documentary specials on MTV, ABC and E!, and she performed a surprisingly unispired live version of her universally panned Onyx Hotel tour for the HBO special “Britney Spears: Live in Miami” in2004. The blonde idol pulled out of the final leg of her poorly received tour after injuring her knee in June of that year, requiring arthroscopic surgery and four months of recuperation (she also admitted that her head “really wasn’t into” the tour).
Bio Courtesy of : Britney Spears Hollywood.com
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