So what REALLY went wrong for Lineker and his lingerie model?
PORTRAIT OF A MAN TRYING TO KEEP UP WITH A WIFE 19 YEARS HIS JUNIOR
THEIR usual winter postcard from the Caribbean — he, surprisingly toned and trim despite his advancing years; she, the youthful epitome of the bombshell second wife — was noteworthy this Christmas only by its absence. For while Gary and Danielle Lineker have marked most years as husband and wife with a luxury break in the sun, it transpires that the only break the couple have experienced this festive season is the fracturing of their marriage.
Lineker, 55, has quietly separated from his wife Danielle, a Welsh former lingerie model, 19 years his junior.
The first anyone knew of it was when news leaked out on Tuesday night that a decree nisi was to be issued at 10am yesterday, bringing the curtain down on their six-year marriage.
Lineker wrote on Twitter: ‘ Thank you all for your kind words. @DanielleBux and I had many wonderful years together. We remain very close and the greatest of friends.’
Danielle, whom he dated for two years before tying the knot, wrote: ‘We have shared the most incredible 8 years that I will always cherish. We will remain the best of friends.’
However, it emerged yesterday that it was Danielle who began the proceedings to end her marriage to the Match Of The Day presenter and former England football star — and cited Gary’s ‘unreasonable behaviour’ as the reason.
A spokesman for Miss Bux explained yesterday: ‘According to UK law, only one party can actually file, regardless of whether it is a mutual decision. The law also states that you have to choose one of two reasons for parting. Either adultery or unreasonable behaviour. Therefore a decision was made for Danielle to file and [it] wasn’t adultery.’
Certainly, it seems the couple have quietly hammered out a financial settlement which is ‘ agreeable to both parties’ and used a government website to end their marriage at a cost of only £400. Perhaps Gary, the quintessential Mr Nice Guy who has a reputed fortune of £20 million, has been very generous.
But what a curious set of circumstances it seems.
Just ten days ago they were spotted out together at the theatre in London, watching a play called The Wasp at Trafalgar Studios.
Danielle wasn’t wearing her wedding ring, but they seemed relaxed in each other’s company.
And only a few weeks ago Danielle tweeted a picture of her husband, who had inadvertently cut his hand while presenting the BBC Sports Personality Of The Year trophy.
‘He’s at it again. @GaryLineker aka Frank Spencer’, she wrote with evident affection.
Pictures posted of them celebrating Christmas with Danielle’s daughter, Ella, 12, from a previous romance, were sweet affairs.
Last year, they were spotted dining out at the Bluebird Restaurant in Chelsea, and at the trendy Chiltern Firehouse in Marylebone.
DANIELLE, 5ft 6in of honey- skinned perfection, wore a see-through blouse on the latter night and her husband looked delighted with the stir she created.
But behind the sanctioned images of social media, all has been far from well in the Lineker household.
Reports claim the split was sparked by the couple being at loggerheads over whether to start a family of their own. At 36, Danielle is said to have wanted a baby while at 55, Gary, the former England striker with four grown sons from his first marriage, felt he was too old.
In interviews Gary varied from saying he had ‘absolutely no plans’ in that direction to saying ‘we’ll see’. By contrast, Danielle said she ‘definitely’ hoped to start a family.
He explained in an interview in 2010: ‘ She has a child and I have four of my own, so we are not sure if we want any more. Some weeks it seems a good idea, other weeks it doesn’t. When we are on a plane and we hear screaming babies, it definitely doesn’t.’
By 2014, the issue had clearly become more awkward. When quizzed again about their plans to start a family, he said with a defensive sigh: ‘We get that question all the time. The actual answer is that we just don’t know. We may or we may not. But there is nothing imminent.’
Perhaps the bigger picture includes the insurmountable strains that come with a sizeable age gap — and wildly different personalities.
For the second Mrs Lineker is extrovert, chatty and emotional just as Lineker is famously controlled and — according to his detractors — cold and boring.
She was, then, the lively young foil to his dependable dullness. ‘She’s much feistier than I am. When we row, I sulk but she throws plates. She’s very witty and smart,’ he said.
Indeed, sources on his side indicate they had been essentially living separate lives for up to a year prior to this week’s divorce.
Danielle has spent long periods in Los Angeles, where she is trying to get a break as an actress.
She has recently filmed a small part in the Amazon series Aquarius, a show about serial killer Charles Manson, starring David Duchovny of The X Files fame.
A horror film with her in a larger role has gone straight to DVD while another micro-budget comedy has disappeared without trace.
But as Lineker has explained, Danielle is hell bent on making it as an actress, even though she took up the craft only after they married.
Danielle, who grew up on a council estate in Wales, worked as an air hostess and then — following breast implants — launched herself as an underwear model before her dreams turned to the movies.
‘Danielle loves acting with the same kind of passion I love football,’ Gary once said. ‘Even though she started very late, she takes it so seriously and she’s trained so hard. It’s starting to create waves.’
But it’s clear her famous husband could not open any doors for her.
There was a period in 2013 when Lineker let slip that they had discussed moving to Los Angeles together to help her career, but he simply couldn’t think what he would do, with soccer being very much a third-tier sport in America. Instead she pursued her dreams in LA, leaving him at home in Barnes, South-West London.
Her daughter Ella lived with them while by all accounts they were on good terms with his children by first wife Michelle. (They have sons George, 23, Harry, 21, Tobias, 19, and Angus, 17.)
Gary and childhood sweetheart Michelle were divorced in 2006, and he was introduced to Danielle Bux the following year. She wasn’t a football fan, but she recognised Gary from the Walkers Crisps adverts. ‘I was surprised at how much younger and more handsome he looked than on TV,’ added Danielle. There was an immediate
spark, and after a few months Gary was introduced to her daughter, whose father is former Coventry City footballer Adam Willis.
Gary and Danielle were married in September 2009 in Ravello, Italy. Lineker was, of course, besotted. Indeed, around the time of the wedding he even went so far as to contemplate surgery to pin back his famously large ears. He ‘dithered’ before giving up on the idea. However, there were signs that Gary had embraced a grooming regime and a new lifestyle in order to keep up with his sexy young wife. A pair of perfectly serviceable eyebrows were introduced to the joys of tweezing, while more recently he has experimented with facial hair in the form of a goatee beard.
His teeth appeared whiter than ever and his orange tan — which his agent suggested was the result of regular holidays in Barbados and Dubai — lent a kind of Ready Brek glow to his features.
There was talk — albeit denied — that he had even dabbled with Botox to keep the wrinkles at bay.
His shirts grew ever tighter over a visibly muscular torso and he began a rigorous programme of exercise with a tough personal trainer.
Of course, the union brought opportunities for his bride. She appeared in the ITV cookery show Hell’s Kitchen in 2009, and performed in a production of Calendar Girls in 2011.
This was followed by a smallish role in the play Responsible Other and a one-off part in BBC1’s Silent Witness in 2013.
There were fun times too, of course, such as Gary’s surprise birthday party in 2012 when he ended up in Stringfellows nightclub until 4am with his wife and his eldest son, George.
‘Mrs L has pulled it out the bag,’ he tweeted afterwards. ‘What a night, what a party, what a hangover, what a wife.’
Other nights out ended at trendy London nightclub Funky Buddha — not staid Lineker’s natural milieu.
Before meeting Danielle, his chief hobby was golf, that most middleaged of sports.
LIneKeR has a six handicap — an achievement which demands many hours spent on the golf course. At home, he was the domestic one. She told an interviewer he was happy to be chopping onions and emptying the dishwasher.
‘ He’s really good around the house. Anything I ask, he’s easy,’ she purred. She added that he wrote her poetry — a revelation which Lineker found, yet again, toecurlingly embarrassing. As surely he found her regular musings on whether or not he was ageing well.
Shortly after their wedding she said: ‘I don’t like the bald thing — I think of Gary and his ears! I’d have to get him to have a transplant.
‘I’ve bought him some multivitamins which are meant to make your hair thicker, just in case.’
She went on to say that he was in the habit of swiping her expensive Creme de la Mer moisturiser in a bid to keep the years at bay.
Gary was so embarrassed by this that he explained later that she had just been joking.
Undeterred, she returned to her theme on the TV show Loose Women a few years later, saying with brutal frankness: ‘I can’t see him bald! You know what his stickyout ears are like!’
How mortifying. But then Danielle — as Lineker has even said himself — is something of a free spirit.
The fact that the couple moved home three times during their brief marriage also reveals a certain restlessless on her part.
At first, Gary’s bachelor pad in esher was traded up for a nicer place in the Surrey gin-and-golf belt, before the couple moved to a pink-painted villa in Barnes, SouthWest London, and then again to a new home within that same area.
Of course, with his £1.5 million salary from the BBC and further money from his contracts with BT Sport and Walkers Crisps, he hasn’t needed to make money on the property ladder.
Danielle, it seems, was the driving force behind it all.
‘That’s my wife, Danielle,’ he told an interviewer in 2013. ‘She does up houses, sells them, moves on.’
And now, sadly, it seems that she has also moved on from him.