Pop icon Rita Ora opens up on health fears and why Davina McCall is encouraging her to ‘hurry up’ and have children

Pop icon Rita Ora has spoken of how she chose to freeze her eggs while she was still in her 20s - and how celebrity friend Davina McCall is already encouraging her to have children. The 35-year-old, best known for songs such as Hot Right Now, How We Do (Party) and I Will Never Let You Down, had two rounds of egg freezing when she was 24 and 27.

She told Women’s Health UK she was advised that was the best time to freeze eggs to "preserve the best quality". “It was actually the best advice, because now I’m in my mid-30s and I have a lot of friends really trying to figure it out. It will just be more of an expansion when the time comes,” she said.

Ora and McCall became friends after starring as judges in ITV singing show The Masked Singer for four years. And she told the publication the former Big Brother presenter is trying to persuade her to have children.

"Davina (McCall) is always like, ‘Hurry up – you can do it'," she went on. “I learned a lot from Davina while working with her on The Masked Singer. My mother’s (breast cancer) treatment stimulated menopause at an early age for her. So I’m trying to get ahead of it and learn about it.”

Her mum, Vera, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, when the singer was 13 years old. She previously opened up about this on McCall’s Begin Again podcast in 2025, and said it led to her developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety about her health.

In 2022, the singer married filmmaker Taika Waititi, who has directed movies such as Jojo Rabbit (2019) and Thor: Love And Thunder (2022). Ora is of British and Albanian descent while her husband was born in New Zealand and is of Maori heritage.

“Our common ground of our mothers being our everything was very important. And the idea of working hard," Ora added.

“We have lots of similarities in our beliefs and morals and how we were raised – I didn’t realise that Albanian and Maori culture are very similar. What works for us is the sense of respecting each other and just being mates and having fun.”

Stepmother to Waititi’s two daughters, the star said: “I don’t know if anything really prepares you, you just have to figure it out in the moment. I’ve loved every second – the girls are just a dream. I think I got very lucky. We have a lot of fun – doing nails, going shopping. I love hanging out with them.”

Beginning her career in 2004, Ora has gone on to achieve four UK number one singles and one UK number one album. She has also made appearances in films such as Fifty Shades Of Grey (2015), Southpaw (2015) and Pokemon Detective Pikachu (2019).

:: The full interview with Rita Ora can be read in the April issue of Women’s Health UK, on sale from March 10