She created one of the greatest karaoke songs of all time, but Natalie Imbruglia has admitted that her path to success wasn’t smooth sailing.

Before she released the chart-topping song “Torn”, Australian singer Imbruglia starred in TV adverts, before quitting school to pursue acting and appear in Neighbours.

Imbruglia, 51, played Beth Brennan on the soap from 1992 to 1994, eventually leaving the home to move to London and work on building out her musical career too.

During an interview on Davina McCall’s Begin Again podcast, Imbruglia revealed that she’d struggled to find work when she’d moved to the UK.

While Neighbours was a huge hit in the UK and had been airing on the BBC since 1986, Imbruglia explained that public backlash meant there was a “crack down on the Neighbours stars taking English actors’ roles” and she hadn’t been able to get a visa to work as an actor.

“That was a hard time because I ran out of money,” she told McCall. “So I was, for a few years, very famous from Neighbours and was doing appearances and appearing in clubs and signing autographs and just getting wads of cash in envelopes and living like that.

Admitting that this was “the first time in my life where everything didn't fall in my lap”, she continued: “So I just partied ’cause I didn't know what to do.

“But then the money ran out. It was my dad once [who] rang and said, ‘Can I just ask, when are you going to get a job?’ And I was so proud. And I screamed at him and kicked off, but I was so embarrassed that he said that to me that I changed things then.”

McCall asked Imbruglia if that shift acted as a “slap in the face” compared to the “pretty luxurious” post-Neighbours life she’d been living back home.

In response, Imbruglia said that it had provided material for her first album, explaining: “I’d run out of money and I was living in a basement at someone's house in Chelsea, which was weird ’cause I had no money and I'm in Chelsea, in this big mansion, but I'm just in the basement.”

Imbruglia said that she ended up having “a lot of conversations with God about if I ever get lucky again”.

Fortunately for her, she did: after meeting manager Anne Barret, Imbruglia recorded four song demos – including an English version of the originally Danish song “Torn” – and signed a record deal with BMG to release the track in 1997.