'''Emma Lee Bunton''' (born January 21, 1976) is an English pop singer-songwriter, originally in the girl group the Spice Girls, where she was known as "Baby Spice" (she was the youngest member).
Personal
Bunton was born in the London district of Finchley, Barnet, and grew up in the suburb of Woodside Park, also in Barnet. Her parents, Pauline, a karate instructor, and Trevor, a milkman, split up when she was eleven, and she stayed with her mother.
She attended St Theresa's Roman Catholic Primary School in Finchley, and then went on to go to the Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone, Westminster.
She has been linked with such stars as Nigel Harman, Justin Timberlake and 911 lead singer Lee Brennan. Her boyfriend for 8 years was former Damage and CherryBlackStone lead singer Jade Jones; the pair broke up in 2006.
She appeared in ''The Bill'' in 1993.
Music career
Spice Girls
She joined the Spice Girls (then still called Touch) in 1994 after the original fifth Touch member, Michelle Stephenson, left the group. The group became one of the most successful musical artists of the 1990s selling over forty million albums with the studio releases ''Spice'', ''Spiceworld'' and ''Forever''. She was known as Baby Spice because she often wore baby doll dresses and had her blonde hair in pigtails. Their debut single "Wannabe" became the first of a string of number-ones in the United Kingdom (nine in total) and reached the top position in thirty-seven countries around the globe, including Australia, Canada, and the U.S. Other successful releases followed including "Say You'll Be There" and "2 Become 1" from ''Spice'', and "Spice Up Your Life", "Too Much", "Stop" and "Viva Forever" from ''Spiceworld'' and "Goodbye", "Holler" and "Let Love Lead the Way" from ''Forever''.
[Chart performances for the singles released by the Spice Girls. Retrieved from http://foreverspice.com/spicediscography/spicegirls.htm]. The Spice Girls stopped recording in 2000.
thumb|left|178 px|Cover for Emma's debut solo album ''A Girl Like Me'' (2001)
''A Girl Like Me''
Her first solo album entitled ''A Girl Like Me'' spawned the number one hit "What Took You So Long?", top five hits "What I Am" (a cover of a song earlier recorded by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians) and "Take My Breath Away" (which was not a cover of the Berlin hit) and top twenty hit "We're Not Gonna Sleep Tonight". The album sold around 125,000 in the UK but this was not sufficient for her record company, who dropped her. She also recorded the track "(Hey You) Free Up Your Mind" for ''Pokémon: The First Movie'' (1999).
''Free Me''
However she soon recovered from being dropped,
