Queen drummer Roger Taylor has been happily married to Sarina Potgieter for 15 years, but his daughter Rory has been less lucky in love.
I hear that Rory, a doctor, has separated from her husband, Rory Hoddell, who arranges luxurious ski holidays for rich clients.
The couple were married in 2021 in a lavish wedding attended by Roger’s band mates.
‘It’s terribly sad,’ one of their friends tells me. ‘Despite her starry background, Rory is very down to earth. They are finding their split hard, particularly for their children.’
The pair exchanged vows in front of their baby son, Buddy. Since then, they have had another child.
Rory’s half-sisters, Lola and the model Tigerlily Taylor, were bridesmaids at the wedding in Mawnan Smith, Cornwall.
Queen guitarist Brian May turned up in a helicopter, landing in the middle of a cricket pitch, stopping play.
While guests might have expected a few renditions of We Will Rock You, the music was, in fact, provided by a folk band.
Rory, a dedicated doctor, is reportedly separating from her husband Rory Hoddell, who organizes luxury ski holidays for wealthy clients
Queen drummer Roger Taylor and wife Sarina Potgieter have shared 15 happy years together, but their daughter Rory has faced more challenges in her love life
Rory, 39, is one of the musician’s two children with his first wife, bereavement counsellor Dominique Beyrand, who is French.
With model Debbie Leng, who can be seen in Queen’s Breakthru video, he had three more children: Rufus, a drummer for The Darkness and a touring musician for Queen + Adam Lambert, Tigerlily and Lola.
Rory has spoken of how she avoided following her father into showbusiness. ‘I knew that I wanted to help people, so I studied medicine and qualified as a GP in 2011,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of pressure in a job like this, and very long hours, but I love it, and Dad has always been so supportive.’
During the pandemic, Roger, 75, voiced his concerns over Rory, who is a GP in west London and continued seeing her patients.
The couple decline to comment.
Lennon sister’s family lament
HER book, Imagine This – Growing up with my brother John Lennon, was adapted into the film Nowhere Boy, but Julia Baird laments that the Beatles star’s sons, Julian and Sean, are nowhere in her life.
‘I’m in touch with both of them, but we’re not great mates or anything like that, we really aren’t,’ she tells me at the Live Odyssey
VIP launch party in the Stables Market, Camden. ‘It’s sad, but when it comes down to it, that’s just the way it is. Julian lives in France and is toing and froing to Los Angeles all the time, and, of course, Sean is based in America.’
She adds: ‘Even if you’re blood related, you have to have a relationship. It’s a shared history you haven’t got.’
Crime writer Richard Osman is making a killing.
The former Pointless host has returned a £1.8 million profit at his artistic creation company, Six Seven Entertainment, in the year to the end of March, taking accumulated profits to £3.7 million and retaining £4.45 million in cash before bills.
Crime writer Richard Osman is thriving financially, with his company Six Seven Entertainment posting a £1.8 million profit in the last year and amassing substantial cash reserves
Osman, 54, is currently on his fifth book in the Thursday Murder Club series. The first title is being turned into a Netflix film by Steven Spielberg.
As Damsel in distress Ann Darrow, Naomi Watts formed an unlikely bond with King Kong, who took her to the top of the Empire State Building in his palm in Peter Jackson’s 2005 epic.
In New York this week, 5ft 5in Naomi Watts was seen looking tiny next to her younger child, Kai Schreiber
And in New York this week the 5ft 5in Hollywood star appeared dwarfed by her younger child, Kai Schreiber, too.
The Kent-born actress, 56, was towered over by 5ft 10in model Kai, 16, whose father is US actor Liev Schreiber. They were at an LGBTQ event hosted by the trans rights fundraiser Mother Daughter Holy Spirit.
Apple guru’s Eve to wed Team GB gold winner in Cotswolds
ARE the Cotswolds – not Canada – becoming America’s 51st state, irrespective of Donald Trump’s desires?
Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, former Ally McBeal star Portia De Rossi, snapped up a farmhouse there for £15million as soon as The Donald won the US election, while Beyonce and her husband, billionaire rapper Jay-Z, intend to base themselves there in June when the
This summer, the Cotswolds will host the society wedding of the year as Eve Jobs, pictured, model daughter of Apple founder Steve Jobs, prepares to marry British Olympic equestrian gold medallist Harry Charles
Harry Charles, left, will be joined by family and friends, alongside a US contingent likely featuring Bill Gates’s daughter Phoebe and former vice president Kamala Harris, who shares a close connection with Eve’s family
Texas-born superstar is on the English leg of her Cowboy Carter world tour.
Now, I can disclose, the Cotswolds’ bucolic charms and honey-stone villages will be the setting this summer for the society wedding of the year when Eve Jobs, 26, model daughter of the late Steve Jobs, billionaire founder of Apple, marries true Brit Harry Charles, who won gold in the team equestrian event at last year’s Olympics in Paris.
Though Harry, 25, will be joined by friends and family – including his father, fellow Olympian gold medallist Peter – they’ll be matched by a US contingent which seems certain to include Bill Gates’s younger daughter, Phoebe, 22, a chum of Eve, and former vice president Kamala Harris, of whom Eve’s mother, Laurene, thinks so highly that she has, in the past, put her private jet at Harris’s disposal.
Why Tracey Emin is ken to downplay her latest works…
Tracey Emin, whose recreation of her squalid bed was once shortlisted for the Turner Prize, has splashed out on building work at a historic seaside townhouse without permission – right under the local council’s nose.
The artist, 61, who was awarded a damehood last year, was given the go-ahead by planners for a ‘change of use’ of the former accountant’s office to a five-bedroom house in Margate, Kent.
But she had already built a new basement kitchen, first-floor partition and second-floor bathroom at the 18th century property, which is Grade II listed.
She also added ground-floor doors to connect to a former printworks-turned artist studio next door, one of four properties in the block which she owns opposite the town council’s offices.
Emin has now applied for retrospective consent and officials at Thanet Council are expected to make a decision later this month.
Her planning agent says: ‘The works are modest in scale and have minimal impact on the conservation area and its historic fabric.’
Launching Saints And Sinners, recording 1,000 years of his family history, including more than 400 years’ occupation of St Michael’s Mount, the island castle off Cornwall, Nicholas St Aubyn reflects: ‘We’ve been captains, not generals; backbenchers, not ministers; barristers, not judges.’
The exception to the rule – the indisputable brilliance of his cousin Edward, author of the Patrick Melrose novels – had proved too much for one of his guests.
‘I threw it in the bin,’ the guest tells me. ‘I didn’t want the staff to read it.’
Ballet star Yasmine’s next role: motherhood!
Royal ballet star Yasmine Naghdi is to stage her disappearance from Covent Garden – for the most delightful of reasons.
I hear that Yasmine, who became in 2017 the first Londoner to be made a principal dancer at Covent Garden since Dame Darcey Bussell 28 years earlier, is expecting her first child.
Royal Ballet principal dancer Yasmine Naghdi, the first Londoner since Dame Darcey Bussell to earn the title, is preparing to take a joyful break from Covent Garden as she expects her first child
‘We are thrilled that we are expecting a little one,’ confirms Yasmine, 33, who married private equity boss Riccardo Ghezzi in 2023.
She shared this photograph of her holding up ultrasound images of their unborn child.
Confirming that their baby is due in December, the ballerina adds: ‘I’m stepping away from the spotlight for a little while to embrace a whole new role: motherhood.’
Disgraced Huw cuts £500,000 of house price
Huw Edwards, who refused to hand back the £200,000 he was paid by the BBC between his arrest and resignation, is having less luck on the property market.
Huw Edwards, 63, who kept his £200,000 BBC pay after his arrest, has now faced property market struggles, cutting the asking price of his family home by £500,000
After listing it last October at £4.75 million, he’s now reduced the price twice, with the property currently available for £4 million
I can disclose that the former newsreader, 63, who pleaded guilty to possessing 41 indecent images of children, some of whom were as young as seven, has slashed the asking price of his family home by another £500,000.
It comes two months after he cut the price from £4.75million to £4.5million. The six-bedroom property in south-east London had been put on the market last October. It’s now yours for £4million.
He and his estranged wife, Vicky Flind, bought the 4,200 sq ft home for £1.85 million in 2006.
Titanic is loved by millions, apart from Kate Winslet’s daughter, Mia Threapleton, who has never watched it all – because of the racy scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio.
‘As I got older, kids sort of knew who my mum was,’ says Mia, 24, who stars in Wes Anderson’s new film, The Phoenician Scheme.
‘Sometimes they asked if I’d ever watched the car scene in Titanic and I’d say no.’ When she was 12, the film was playing on the family television.
‘That was the only scene I ever remember her going, “Oh God!” and covering my eyes! And I remember turning round and saying, “Mum, I can still hear it!”‘
(Very) modern manners
Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville is finding the politically correct literary world challenging. ‘I’ve just handed in my first children’s book, Rory Sparks And The Elephant In The Room, which is coming out in October,’ he tells me at Goodwoof, the dog show and event at Goodwood in West Sussex. ‘It’s been through its diversity read, which was interesting. Words you can and can’t say these days is quite interesting.’ Mimicking his publisher, the actor, 61, says: ‘Could you not say cowboy or cowgirl, but cowhand?’ ‘No, I’m saying cowboy and cowgirl, thank you very much!’ Things like that.’
