Did Miley Cyrus’s mum, 56, REALLY steal her new TV star husband from her other daughter, 24?
She’s the pop star who’s banked a fortune from her break-up anthem. Now her family’s suffering its own heartache
THE Cyrus family know better than anyone that breaking up can be good for business.
More than 30 years after country singer Billy Ray Cyrus had a triple platinum hit with Achy Breaky Heart, his daughter Miley Cyrus smashed online streaming records with her break-up anthem Flowers, reportedly about her painful split from her actor husband, Australian Liam Hemsworth.
But the Cyrus clan’s latest romantic drama is unlikely to be a subject for any new songs.
For matriarch Tish Cyrus — ex-wife of Billy Ray and mother of Miley — stands accused of ‘stealing’ her new husband, British-born actor Dominic Purcell... from her youngest daughter, singer and actress Noah.
A family insider has told Us Weekly magazine that 56-year-old Tish had fought with 24-year-old Noah over 54-year-old Purcell.
‘Noah was [seeing] Dominic when Tish started pursuing him,’ said the source, adding that Tish ‘was aware’ of this when she began to contact the actor on social media.
‘The turmoil between Noah and Tish goes far beyond [what people think]. Noah is very distraught over Tish stealing Dominic from her.’
Which goes a long way to explain why neither Noah — from whom Tish is apparently now estranged — nor her brother, Braison Cyrus, attended their mother’s wedding to Purcell at Miley’s Malibu mansion last summer.
Us Weekly said none of the members of this bizarre love triangle had responded to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Tish Cyrus, a film producer and businesswoman who has managed the music careers of both her daughters since they started performing, claimed earlier this month on a podcast series, Call Her Daddy, that she’d long had a crush on Purcell.
She claimed that after watching the muscly, heavily tattooed actor — who was born in Birkenhead, Merseyside, but moved with his family to Australia as a child — on the TV drama series Prison Break, she had followed him on Instagram.
In 2016 he had messaged her to say: ‘I think you’re super cool and ... you’re doing such a great job with your family.’
She said romance blossomed when, six years later in 2022, shortly after filing for divorce from Billy Ray Cyrus, Tish contacted Purcell and suggested they meet, purportedly to discuss a potential TV project.
Purcell told her he had a ‘crush’ on her, and on the podcast she revealed that they had gone out for lunch and ‘made out for three hours’, later exchanging ‘I love you’ messages.
She insisted she had given up any thought of remarrying following her split from Billy Ray, but had been swept away by the actor.
‘I cannot even tell you how amazing he is,’ she gushed. ‘I am living my best life, and he is yummy.’
But it was soon clear that might not have been the whole story. When neither Noah nor her brother attended their mother’s wedding last August, Cyrus watchers and fans of Miley speculated that something was up.
At the time family insiders insisted the siblings had been unable to attend because of work commitments — only for Noah to puncture that explanation by posting pictures of herself — defiantly wearing a Billy Ray Cyrus T-shirt — and her brother at a branch of the hypermarket Walmart. Insiders told Us Weekly that Noah hadn’t been invited to the nuptials and claimed Miley had even posted armed guards outside her home to stop her sister — who lives nearby — gatecrashing.
The news that the notoriously chaotic Cyrus family may be even more dysfunctional than was previously assumed comes just weeks after Miley, 31, mysteriously appeared to snub her father at the Grammy Awards.
On stage at the music industry’s biggest annual shindig to accept the Record of the Year award for her
Flowers single, she rattled off a long list of those she wanted to thank — from which Billy Ray, surely the most influential musical figure in her early years, was notably absent.
‘I don’t think I’ve forgotten anyone, but I might have forgotten underwear,’
‘I’m living my best life — and he’s yummy’
said the once squeaky-clean Disney star as she walked off stage in a revealing ‘naked’ dress made of 14,000 gold safety pins.
Sources close to Miley say she is upset by her father’s behaviour towards the end of his 30-year marriage to her mother — an almost comically roller-coaster union.
An insider said that while ‘Miley is all about peace’, angry words have been exchanged with her father and that both of them are now ‘upset’ and expecting an apology from the other that hasn’t been forthcoming.
For his part, sources close to Billy Ray insist he’s actually tried to make up with his daughter many times.
Meanwhile, Miley and her siblings seem to have complicated matters by taking different sides in their parents’ schism. Miley unfollowed her father on Instagram after her parents’ split, and then agreed to be her mother’s maid of honour at the marriage to Dominic Purcell.
‘Dom and my mom share the sweetest, most genuine love,’ she gushed of the match.
‘It’s almost like it’s for the first time, which is so fitting for my mom, who is such a young soul.’
Then, in October last year Miley failed to attend her father’s wedding to the Australian singer Firerose, 27 years his junior, at a ceremony they described as ‘the most perfect, ethereal celebration of love we could have ever imagined’.
Firerose had met Billy Ray on the set of Miley’s hit Disney series Hannah Montana when she auditioned for the show in 2010, and they kept in touch.
The star hasn’t commented on her apparently fractured relationship with her father, who lived in Tennessee for two years
‘Dom and my mom share the sweetest love’
during the pandemic while Tish stayed in California.
Tish, however, has talked about her split from Billy Ray. Smoking a cannabis joint, she recounted on the recent podcast how she had suffered a month-long ‘complete psychological breakdown’ before finally divorcing him in 2022.
The psychology of the Cyrus family takes a little explaining.
Billy Ray met his future wife, then Leticia ‘Tish’ Finley, at a Tennessee bar in 1991. She was a single mother to two young children, whom he would adopt after their marriage.
At the time, Cyrus — who came from rural poverty — was a struggling singer who, although only a year away from releasing his cheesy mega-hit Achy Breaky Heart, was living out of his car. The following year, he had a son, Cody, with a South Carolina waitress and, seven months later, Tish gave birth to his daughter, Miley.
Billy Ray and Tish married secretly in 1993 while she was pregnant with Braison, Billy Ray ignoring the advice of his record company who feared that settling down to have a family would wreck his career.
They lived on a 500-acre farm in Tennessee, but a rift soon developed between them over their elder daughter’s future.
Her father, whose career had ossified after the acclaim of Achy Breaky Heart, which had made him $40 million in a single year, didn’t want Miley to go into showbusiness at a young age, fearing she wouldn’t be able to handle rejection.
Tish, however, who had been disappointed in her own ambitions to become a dancer, disagreed and encouraged her.
She recently claimed she had pushed her daughter into showbusiness because she thought it would keep the family together — and in time they all moved from Tennessee to Los Angeles for the sake of Miley’s career.
Miley was 11 when she first auditioned for Disney but — considered too young — she had to wait two years before she won the title role of fictional pop star Hannah Montana in the Disney Channel drama series that would make her a teen icon.
Her attempts to shake off her wholesome Disney veneer as she grew older attracted endless controversy, with her young fans’ parents appalled by the provocative outfits she often wore.
In 2007, aged 15, Miley — by then estimated to be worth $14 million — was forced to apologise to fans for suggestive photographs, taken by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair, which showed her topless with only a cream silk sheet wrapped around her body.
Two years later, she performed a pole-dancing routine at the 2009 Teen Choice Awards. A year later, she caused outrage when she pretended to kiss one of her female backing singers backstage on Britain’s Got Talent.
Some critics blamed her showbusiness parents for failing to protect her. (In the case of the Vanity Fair photoshoot, however, it turned out they had left before the final provocative shot.)
The truth was that Billy Ray and Tish had enough problems keeping their own lives on track. By the time Tish finally filed for divorce in 2022, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’ and admitting they hadn’t lived together for two years, they’d already made two previous attempts to split up.
In 2010, Billy Ray had filed for divorce, only to withdraw his petition five months later. Then, in 2013, they went ahead with a legal application to dissolve their marriage — this time at Tish’s request — only to have second thoughts once more and call it off a month later.
‘We both woke up and realised we love each other and decided we want to stay together,’ she said in a statement at the time.
‘We went into couples therapy, something we hadn’t done in 22 years of being together, and it’s brought us closer and really opened up our communication in amazing ways,’ she added,
They claimed that they didn’t want to be just another statistic.
According to Billy Ray, the Disney TV series that not only launched his daughter’s career but revived his own — he played Hannah Montana’s father and manager — was chiefly to blame for the family’s woes.
In 2011 — the same year he temporarily left the family in LA and went to live back in Tennessee — he told GQ magazine that the hit TV show had ‘destroyed my family’, and even claimed they were under attack from Satan.
He said: ‘I was going to work every single day knowing that my family
‘Just like all families, we’re also complex’
had fallen apart, but yet I had to sit in front of that camera.’
Of Miley he said: ‘I’m scared for her. She’s got a lot of people around her that are putting her in a great deal of danger.’
When, later that year, a leaked video — made on Miley’s 18th birthday — showed her using a ‘bong’ to smoke what looked like cannabis (it was later revealed to be the herb salvia), he tweeted: ‘Sorry guys. I had no idea . . . There is much beyond my control right now.’
Miley and Noah Cyrus have both had controversial romantic lives themselves.
Noah, like her big sister a former Disney star, was linked with a string of rappers and DJs in often toxic relationships which she said led to substance abuse. She announced last year that she is engaged to a fashion designer named Pinkus.
Miley says she told her mother when she was only 14 that she was attracted to both sexes, and has since said that she is ‘open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age’.
Although she has been involved in heterosexual relationships with Liam Hemsworth, whom she married in 2018, and singer Nick Jonas, she says she is ‘queer’.
In 2021, she gave an interview to British Vogue. ‘I have a very intimate and close relationship with my family,’ she said. ‘But like all families, we’re also complex.’
Given the romantic strife between her mother and her sister, she can hardly be accused of exaggeration.