Brucie’s £11.5m will riddle
Widow gets it all ... but did he plan to snub his five girls in favour of his son?
HE once said that he believed inheritance should go to ‘your children rather than your country’.
But it seems Sir Bruce Forsyth favoured one of his six children over the others in his will.
The television personality, who died last August aged 89, left £11.5million to his third wife, 60year-old Lady Wilnelia.
The move is believed to have been designed to avoid paying inheritance tax because assets passed between husband and wife are not subject to the tax.
Interestingly, however, the will stipulates that if Sir Bruce had died after Lady Wilnelia, their only child, Jonathan Forsyth- Johnson, 30, would have received 80 per cent of the estate. The remaining 20 per cent would have been shared between his five half-sisters.
Jonathan, known as JJ, is the youngest of Sir Bruce’s children. He had five daughters from his first two marriages.
Debbie, Julie and Laura, are from his 20-year marriage to dancer Penny Calvert, which ended in divorce in 1973 after Sir Bruce had a string of affairs.
He also has Charlotte and Louisa, from his second marriage to Generation Game hostess Anthea Redfern, which ended in divorce in 1979. Sir Bruce met Puerto Rican beauty queen Wilnelia Merced when she was a fellow judge for the 1980 Miss World contest. They married three years later.
Probate records reveal that the former Generation Game and Strictly Come Dancing host left £100,000 in a trust, which was drawn up in 2005, to be split between his nine grandchildren when they reached the age of 21, and £20,000 each to two executors of his estate. Everything else in his £11,718,242 estate, after funeral and legal expenses, went to Lady Wilnelia.
Sir Bruce, whose career spanned 75 years, once described inheritance tax as ‘a bit over the top’, telling Radio Times in 2015: ‘I think your inheritance should go to your children more than back to the country you’ve lived in.’
Last August Sir Bruce’s manager, Ian Wilson, said that ‘all his chil-
dren’ were with him when he died peacefully at his £4million home in Virginia Water, Surrey, after contracting bronchial pneumonia.
The star had been unwell for some time and had not been seen in public since late 2015.
By leaving almost his entire estate to his wife, Sir Bruce prevented the estate having to pay any inherit- ance tax. A 40 per cent levy would have been due on anything over £325,000 which he did not leave to his spouse or charity.
Lady Wilnelia, a former actress and model who won the Miss World contest in 1975, was known to have a close relationship with her step - children and previously praised her husband’s daughters, describing them as ‘her friends’.
She said: ‘I couldn ’t sleep the night before [meeting them for the first time]. I changed my clothes 100 times; I put my hair up, then took it down, I wanted to look older. [My friend] Teresa said, “Just be yourself”.
‘The girls welcomed me so quickly. I feel that when you give love you get love back – it’s as simple as that – and I have loved them from the start. Charlotte and Louisa were only four and five when we met.
‘All credit to their mothers for the way they raised them. The girls have been my friends.’
Sir Bruce, who left school in Edmonton, north London, without any qualifications, made his BBC television debut on a talent show in 1939 when he was only 11.
However, his big TV break did not come until 1958 when, after making his name on the variety circuit, he hosted Sunday Night at the Lon - don Palladium.
Other hit shows included Play Your Cards Right and the P rice Is Right. He entered the Guinness World Records in 2012 for having the longest career of any male TV entertainer.
‘The girls have been my friends’