I was embarrassed being a millionaire at just 22
HIT-MAKERS: Rick with Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman in 1987 although I like a beer and a glass of good wine, not much went down my throat either.”
Sustaining him has been his Danish partner Lene Bausager – an Oscar-nominated film producer – whom he’d met in 1988 in Denmark where she worked for his record label. The couple, who live in south London, have one daughter, Emilie, 26, at art college in Copenhagen. He and Lene, now his manager, married in 2013.
Showbusiness of course is littered with the husks of failed relationships. Surely temptation must have been around every corner for a good-looking guy like himself?
“That’s true except I wasn’t a good-looking guy until I had my first number one record,” he says. “Only then did people start referring to me as ‘the hunky Rick Astley’. But I’m not hunky nor have I ever been.”
Despite Astley first meeting Lene when he was 22, it took him another 25 years before he asked her to be his wife. So why the wait?
“I think my mindset was that, if you get married, you can get divorced,” he explains. “But if you’re together unmarried, you’re more likely to stay together. That’s nonsense, of course, but it obviously harked back to what happened to my mum and dad.
“Eventually, I came to the realisation I didn’t ever want to be with anyone else. I’m just as much in love with Lene today as when we first met. I’m really glad we decided to marry. It’s not just a piece of paper. It really means something.”
ASTLEY is the picture of well-balanced contentment today but it wasn’t always so. Back in the 1990s he had a personal crisis. “I wouldn’t call it a nervous breakdown but it was as though I’d hit a brick wall,” he confides. It happened when he was being driven to Heathrow for yet one more work trip to New York.
“And that’s when something inside me snapped. I leant over to the driver and said: ‘You’re going to have to turn the car around and take me home.’ I’d developed a fear of flying. Actually, I quite quickly realised it wasn’t that at all. I didn’t want to get on a plane because I didn’t want to get to wherever it was going. I wanted to be at home with Lene and our baby.
“I was 27 and it occurred to me that I’d never really grown up. I hadn’t done the normal things that normal people do. I’d never taken the bins out. I’d gone from being a lad to being a chart-topping global star. And I wanted to be able to take Emilie to the playground without having to wear a funny hat and avoid meeting people’s eyes.”
So began a long period of not doing much other than throwing himself into family life. It gave him not only a greater appreciation of his earlier achievement but a greater delight in success this time around.
“I can walk around the streets now and I might get recognised but I’m left alone,” he says. “We did a small American tour recently and I might have been selling out a stadium but I was having dinner across the road before I went on stage.
“My conclusion is that I’ve grown up but so has my audience. Second chances are rare in this business,” says Astley. “And I never stop appreciating how lucky that makes me.” Tour details: rickastley.co.uk