Cheryl

Cheryl Ann Tweedy was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 30 June 1983, and grew up on council estates in the suburbs of Walker and Heaton. She is the fourth of five children of Joan Callaghan, and the first of her two children with Garry Tweedy following the collapse of her marriage to the father of her three other children. Cheryl's parents were together for more than a decade but never married; they separated when she was 11 years old. Cheryl's paternal line originates from Tyneside. Among her paternal ancestry were a number of coal miners and several mariners. Her maternal grandmother, Olga Ridley, was one of twin girls born to Edith Annie Burton, the housekeeper for a widower named Joseph Ridley who already had a number of children from his marriage. Joseph Ridley had fought in World War I in the Durham Light Infantry as a Pioneer in France and before the war had been a grocery warehouseman.

At the age of seven, Cheryl appeared in a television advertisement for British Gas. Interested in dancing from an early age, she began sequence dancing at the age of four, and participated in a short summer holiday course at the Royal Ballet School's Summer School at the age of nine. She occasionally appeared doing dance recitals on different television shows in the UK, such as Gimme 5, in 1993.