Hey Jude, who’s that brainy bride you’ve secretly wed?
As former bad boy Jude secretly weds an academic 14 years his junior...
GIVEN Jude Law’s track record with women in the 16 years since he split from his first wife, you’d be forgiven for thinking re-marriage was the last thing on his mind.
For the handsome film star has dated a veritable red carpet line-up of beauties.
There was the scandal-drenched period in which he dated Sienna Miller on and off and was caught cheating with his children’s nanny Daisy Wright.
He also took Luther actress Ruth Wilson to the Box nightclub and was linked to young model Lily Cole. Embarrassing footage then emerged of Jude chatting up a Hungarian Playboy model in a bar in Budapest, apparently heavily inebriated.
When he wasn’t partying, he found time to impregnate two young women — an aspiring model and an aspiring singer — in 2008 and 2014. And it later transpired that over 2014 and 2015 he dated a glamorous French mother-of-two whom he had seduced after bumping into her on the street and insisting on exchanging phone numbers.
It’s fair to say that none of those relationships were long-lasting, yet earlier this week he made the ultimate commitment by marrying Dr Phillipa Coan, his girlfriend of four years, a blonde psychologist who, at 32, is 14 years his junior.
Jude certainly wasn’t shy about his ‘secret’ nuptials. There was a hint of the peacock about him as he emerged from his marriage ceremony at London’s Marylebone Town Hall on Wednesday wearing an eye-catching £840 Boglioli corduroy suit, striking Burberry bluetinted sunglasses, and conspicious £200 teal suede lace-ups and a battered vintage fedora hat. His new wife looked stunning in a ruffled cream mini dress and towered above her husband in nude heels.
The couple’s body language, too, didn’t always appear to fit the traditional expectation of newlyweds — at one point the bride and guests trailed behind the star as he hopped, bearing a plastic bag, into a chauffeurdriven Range Rover. But the pair are said to be potty about each other, and there is an expectation that he plans to add to his brood of five children by starting a family with Phillipa.
What a turnaround for a man whose very name was once synonymous with a hedonistic (and some would say rather unsavoury) lifestyle.
When married to first wife Sadie Frost, he was part of the notorious ‘Primrose Hill Set’ — a group of celebrities who lived in the North London neighbourhood in the Nineties and early Noughties, who had a reputation for drinking, drug taking . . . and bed hopping.
Jude was relatively young, 25, in 1997 when he married actress Sadie, who is seven years his senior. Already a father to Rafferty then, he was out of the relationship by 2003, by which time they had three children — Rafferty, Iris, and Rudy.
Given that he met Sadie aged just 19, an age when men are usually a long way from settling down, it’s no wonder he wanted to embrace single life after they split up.
He said he had changed a lot by the time he turned 30, when they finally parted ways. Certainly, former fiancee Sienna Miller confirmed that Jude Law wasn’t ‘ready for marriage’ just before they finally split.
He cheated on actress Sienna with his children’s nanny Daisy Wright in 2005 when she was away filming. He issued a grovelling public apology saying he was ‘sorry and ashamed’ for hurting her.
In a thinly veiled reference to Law’s cheating, Sienna once said of the louche celebrity lifestyle: ‘I don’t think it’s normal, I don’t think it’s admirable, I don’t think it’s desirable.’
HIS bachelor years produced two more children. Sophia who was born in 2009 to American Samantha Burke. She had a week-long fling with him in New York when he was filming Sherlock Holmes — they met on the street outside a nightclub.
She was working as a waitress in Hooters, New Jersey, a U.S. chain restaurant staffed by pretty waitresses in revealing clothing.
After a paternity test, he agreed to support their child, and is said to pay £4,600 a month in support plus school and medical fees.
Cat Cavelli, the mother of daughter Ada who was born in 2015, met him in a bar in Soho in 2014 and said they had a seven-month romance. She now lives in Hampstead and he is a part of their lives; she says he is good at changing nappies and that her daughter has spent time with his children by Sadie Frost.
So, just who is the woman who appears to have finally tamed this notorious ladies’ man? Certainly, the low-profile academic, who has never worked in the entertainment industry, represents a striking contrast to the women Law has previously been involved with.
Jude is said to admire the elegant beauty’s ‘intelligence and independence’ and, in the early days of their relationship three years ago, he told the U.S. TV show Modern Living: ‘She’s mine and no one else’s. I’m very, very happy. Our relationship is a very private thing, and I think part of the fact it works so well is exactly because of that.’
After the wedding, which was attended by his son Rafferty, 22, Jude’s parents, and her family, there was a behind-closed-doors party at Alfred’s club in London.
The former London residence of the Duke of Westminster, it is the only detached house in Mayfair and with its Persian rugs, easy chairs and dark wood panelling, the club is an appropriately private venue for media-averse Law. It has a super discreet members-only restaurant which will have been the perfect place for his wedding reception.
It’s not clear who was on the guest list, but the promise of a big kneesup with old drinking companions such as actors Jonny Lee Miller, Sean Pertwee and Ewan McGregor seems to have been wide of the mark, perhaps another sign that
this relationship will be different. His sister Natasha, a graphic designer, was at the register office as were his parents Peter and Maggie, who live in France.
However it’s not clear whether daughter Iris, 18, or son Rudy, 16, were there. I am told, though, that Sadie knows Phillipa well, having been introduced to her in the early days of the romance, and thoroughly approves of Jude’s choice.
When Dr Coan came into Jude’s life in early 2015, it transpired that he had also been dating widowed millionaire Rachel Bourlier, whom he had met in London. She complained that he had broken her heart, because she found out that he was dating Dr Coan after reading about it in the newspapers.
‘I had really hoped that we would spend the rest of our lives together,’ she said. ‘It is so painful.’
PHILLIPA and Jude were reportedly introduced by mutual friends and were first seen together at the Hay Literary Festival.
They now live together in a spectacular house in Highgate, North London. Police have been called to one particularly loud party at the house, and Jude is said to have built a gym in the basement as he keeps in formidable shape for his acting career via boxing and martial arts.
Star of the Sky series The Young Pope, and its sequel The New Pope, pictures of him dressed in tight white trunks walking along the beach for a fantasy sequence in the series recently, caused a sensation.
Perhaps part of the attraction to Phillipa is that her background is about un-luvvie as it is possible to get. She is from Kingston, Surrey; Her father Connol is a chartered surveyor, and mother Kathleen a housewife. She has three sisters — Holly, Jenny and Laura.
In her professional life she is impressively qualified. She started out with a BSc degree in psychology from Birmingham in 2007, writing a dissertation on ‘ the dynamism of
gender stereotype content.’ There followed a one-year MSc at City University, London, where she did a doctorate on the effects of perfectionism on sleep quality. Next was a period as a visiting lecturer in Birmingham, before she went to Leeds to complete a PhD in organisational psychology.
Since 2012, Phillipa has worked as an independent consultant and in October 2015 — nine months after meeting Jude Law — she set up her own company, Stride Group Limited.
This offers environmental advice to executives. All very impressive, if not necessarily very lucrative judging by the most recent filing to Companies House, which suggests net assets of £23,000.
On her LinkedIn page she writes: ‘ I apply psychology to help organisations improve their energy and broader environmental performance through employee behaviour change.
‘ I am passionate about combining the people- skills of psychologists with the more technical-skills of energy management specialists to generate significant savings. I strongly believe it is only through this collaboration that we can achieve longer term sustainability and resource efficiency.’
She has been able to combine her career with accompanying Jude Law on numerous trips abroad, supporting him while he has filmed The Young Pope.
They have been seen together numerous times in Los Angeles, in Rome, and in Venice, too. In 2016, Phillipa went with him to New York and they were seen ice skating in Central Park together with Rudy, his youngest son.
Jude, whose performance as Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley in 1999 made him an international star, mused in 2016 that his behaviour had at times been less than perfect.
He said: ‘I regret hurting people. It’s an awful thing. And trying to gain the forgiveness or the understanding of someone you’ve hurt, or heal a pain you may have inflicted, that’s where regret hits hard.
‘To regret something is almost to regret the lesson learned from it.
‘And if you’ve learned your lesson then it was probably a good thing in some way. F***ing up or being an idiot and having to pay the consequences for that? It’s how you learn.’
His many fans will hope that he has now learned all the lessons necessary for a long, happy — and faithful — marriage.