Britney Jean Spears is an American singer, dancer and actress. She was born on December 2nd, 1981, in McComb, Mississippi, and raised in Kentwood, Louisiana. She performed acting roles in stage productions and television shows as a child before singing with Jive Records in 1997. Take a look below for 30 more interesting and fascinating facts about Britney Spears.

1. Britney Spears’s first and second studio albums, …Baby One More Time and Oops!… I Did It Again, became massive international successes, with the former becoming the best selling album by a teenage solo artist.

2. In 2001, Spears released her self-titled third studio album, Britney, which spawned the international hit single “I’m a Slave 4 U”.

3. She assumed creative control of her fourth studio album, In the Zone, which yielded the worldwide success of the single “Toxic”, which earned Spears her first and only Grammy award.

4. In 2007, her much publicized personal issues sent her career into a downward spiral.

5. Her fifth studio album, Blackout, was released later that year and spawned international hit singles such as “Gimme More” and “Piece of Me”.

6. Spears is regarded as a pop icon and credited with influencing the revival of teen pop music during the late 1990’s.

7. Rolling Stone recognized her instant success as one of the Top 25 Teen Idol Breakout Moments of all time, while VH1 ranked her 11th on their 100 Greatest Women in Music list in 2012.

8. “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” is mistranslated. The Swedish writer for the Britney Spears song thought that “hit me” was American slang for “call me”.

9. The snake from Britney Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” VMAs performance is still alive and is a lot bigger now; roughly 100 pounds and nearly 15 feet.

10. The British Navy uses Britney Spears music to scare off Somali pirates.

11. The movie High School Musical was spawned from a little script titled “Grease 3” that was to star Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake as Dany and Sandy’s kids.

12. During her infamous downfall in 2007, Craig Ferguson said that he wouldn’t mock her due to his own alcohol related issues.

13. Kevin Federline’s rap album, which was produced by his then-wife Britney Spears, has the lowest rating of any album that’s on Metacritic.

14. In 2009, Britney Spears was set to star in the movie “The Yellow Star of Sophia and Eton” where she invents the time machine and then travels back to a World War II concentration camp and falls in love.

15. In April, 2002, through the efforts of Britney Spears and The Britney Spears Foundation, a grant of $1 million was made to the Twin Towers Fund to support the children of uniformed service heroes affected by the disaster of September 11, 2001.

16. Britney Spears put Melissa Joan Hart in her music video after an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, in which Sabrina magically makes an appearance in Spears’s music video.

17. She auditioned for the part of Catwoman in Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises.

18. Spears wrote the song “Everytime” on the piano and mostly by herself. It was a worldwide hit.

19. A Canadian radio station sold Britney Spears’s used pregnancy test for $5,001.

20. Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Justine Timberlake were all regular cast members of The Mickey Mouse Club before their careers started.

21. Spears’s mom heard her singing as a young girl and began entering her in local talent shows.

22. A couple of years into Spears’s music career, her father bought a gym a turned it into a family business. at 12 years old, Spears was already helping her father organize aerobics instructors on their class schedules.

23. Another one of her part time jobs was working for her great-grandmother’s crawfish restaurant. She was a waitress and learned to use the cash register.

24. When Spears was asked which Disney character she would be, she picked Daisy Duck. Her reasoning was that Daisy is tough and knows what she wants but she’s still cute and has a feminine sense of style.

25. At only 10 years old, Spears was the understudy for a lead part in an off-Broadway play called Ruthless!

26. Her look became iconic in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Her songs and music videos helped defined a generation.

27. Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake dated from 1999 to 2002. When they broke up in 2002, rumors swirled that Spears had cheated on Timberlake.

28. Around the same time that Spears broke up with Justin Timberlake, her parents also got a divorce.

29. Spears was almost involved with Prince William before he dated Kate Middleton. The prince and the pop star were supposed to go on a date, but it never happened.

30. In 2000, she bought a $1.5 million loft in New York City for her brother, Bryan. In 2002, she almost burned the place down when she accidentally knocked a candle over.