Billy Ray Cyrus has wished his daughter Miley Cyrus a happy birthday

He wrote on Instagram: "Happy Birthday Mile !!! Hope it's the best one ever! I know I dropped the 'y.' That's what I called @mileycyrus most of her life."

The 'Flowers' hitmaker did not acknowledge her father's message publicly but did thank her fans for the well wishes on her special day.

She wrote: "Thank you all for the birthday wishes."

"My gift to my fans is celebrating my 6 million plaques with you."

Billy Ray had enjoyed a successful career in music and most notably had a hit with 'Achy Breaky Heart' in the years before he and Miley teamed up together to star in the Disney Channel series 'Hannah Montana'.

The show - which followed Miley as a schoolgirl who had a secret identity as a pop star - ran from 2006 until 2011 but Miley and her father are thought to have been on tricky terms since he married singer Firerose in October 2023, although he filed for divorce after less than a year.

Billy Ray began dating Firerose in 2022, but had met her more than a decade before, when she was auditioning for a project at the same studios where he and Miley filmed the late 2000s sitcom.

Despite rumours of their apparent estrangement, Miley recently claimed that she had "a lot of love" for her father.

During an appearance on 'My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman', Miley was asked about her relationship with her parents, with the host pondering: "Is it unlikely that both parents would share an equal role going through your life - where it's always going to be one or the other is closer as things evolve?"

She replied: "It's really just not the closeness. I think it's the capacity in which my mom was raised by a completely intact, beautiful family. Actually, my mom was adopted so my mom was chosen.

"Her parents couldn't have children so they wanted her more than anything in the world. So my mom came in to this world being wanted and being loved and being given the most beautiful life. My grandmother spoiled not only her but me completely rotten. My dad didn't have that.

"The way my dad was raised, he grew up very poor in a very small town. His parents were divorced when he was very young.

"My dad had a pretty rough childhood and my childhood, really -I mean, we can go on and talk about the hard times and the struggles; you know, turning in my homework and learning my lines was tough - but I had food, I had love, I grew up in a beautiful big house.

"And my dad didn't have that. So I have a lot of empathy and compassion for his childhood, which obviously developed to create the man he is now that I have a lot of love for."