Marriage split for model Elle, 53 ...will she ever find true love?
SUPERMODEL Elle Macpherson has split from her billionaire husband Jeffrey Soffer after four years of marriage, sources claim. The 53-year-old beauty is understood to be searching for a new home after leaving the £16million Florida mansion they shared. Australian-born Elle – nicknamed “The Body” – moved to the US from London to be with hotel and property magnate Mr Soffer, 47. But a friend of the model said yesterday: “Elle and Jeff are definitely over. She has left their house in Indian Creek in Miami with her kids and is looking for her own house in Miami. “He has been linked to some other women, but insists they are just friends.” The split is the latest twist in a private life that has seen Elle marry twice and have two sons with long-term partner Arpad Busson. Among eligible bachelors she has dated in the past is singersongwriter Billy Joel, who wrote hit single Uptown Girl about her. Elle began dating Mr Soffer in 2009. They split briefly but reunited after he survived a 2012 helicopter crash in which a friend died. They married in Fiji a year later and Elle, who runs her own lingerie and skincare business and is worth an estimated £38million, moved to Miami. News of the break-up was unexpected. Last year, Elle told how her sons Arpad, 19, and Aurelius, 14, had bonded with Mr Soffer’s three children from his first wife Kimberly. She said the family, who live in a palm-lined palace on a sprawling waterfront estate, have “deep respect” for each other. “I don’t believe in telling him how to raise his kids,” she said. “We have a deep respect for each other’s profound commitment to parenting, so we would both probably say that the children come first.” Two years ago the couple were said to be planning to have a child together by surrogacy. Elle dated Billy Joel for about a year in the early 1980s after he met her, fellow model Christie Brinkley and the late singer Whitney Houston at a piano bar on the Caribbean island of St Barts. Joel went on to marry Brinkley – who starred in his Uptown Girl video – and Elle wed her first husband, French fashion photographer Gilles Bensimon, who was 21 years her senior. She split from him after three years, then lived in London with Mr Busson for nearly a decade.