Baby at 64 for delighted Dame Julia
A LEADING figure in Britain’s art world has become a mother for the first time at 64.
Dame Julia Peyton-Jones, who left her role as co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery last summer, has named her baby daughter Pia.
No details have been released about the pregnancy or whether fertility treatment or a surrogate were involved.
But friends say that Dame Julia, who received her title in last year’s Birthday Honours list, is “delighted”.
It is understood the former artist, who has moved to the US since leaving the Serpentine, had confided only to her very closest friends of her desire to start a family. Leading financier Robin Saunders, who knows her well, said: “Julia will be a wonderful mother and role model for her daughter. “I wish her happiness with Pia.” Dame Julia is not the first high-flying businesswoman to have a child later in life. Last year, top M&S executive Laura Wade-Gery surprised the retail world when she quit her role after having her first child at the age of 50.
And Patricia Rashbrook, a child psychiatrist from Lewes, East Sussex, had a boy, nicknamed JJ, in 2006, after fertility treatment when she was 62.
Women older than Dame Julia have become parents.
In 2013 Annegret Raunigk, from Berlin – who already had 13 children – fell pregnant with quadruplets at 65 after having fertility treatment at a clinic in Ukraine.