Rich, successful but full of heartache
Around the marriage breakdown of David Walliams and his wife of four years, Lara Stone, swirls the kind of tender-hearted speculation that often accompanies showbusiness splits. One theory is that Lara has kicked her husband out after wearying of his “cross-dressing” tendencies, while another is that David was unhappy with Lara’s recent appearance in a raunchy Calvin Klein underwear ad with Justin Bieber, the gormless Canadian pop star.
Why stop there? Maybe Walliams, 43, was so worn out after swimming the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar and the length of the River Thames that he couldn’t manage his husbandly duties. Or perhaps Lara, 31, who did a stint in rehab before their wedding, was slipping back into bad habits.
We probably shouldn’t ask what goes on inside other people’s marriages. Yet people claim to have seen it coming.
The hyperactive, depression-plagued comedian and the curvy Dutch-born model – described by Tom Ford the designer, as “quite ridiculously sexy” – never looked like an obvious pairing. They met one afternoon at a Chelsea football match. Asked later whether it was love at first sight, Lara rolled her eyes and said: “Well, it was for him.”
They were married in 2010, and in 2013 a son, Alfred, was born.
Walliams’s life became a blur. No more the player of caricature grotesques in the low-budget television series Little Britain, he became a human energy source, zooming around the popcultural landscape as an actor, scriptwriter, drag-dressing talent-show judge, long-distance swimmer and bestselling children’s author.
Last year, he overtook JK Rowling and Philip Pullman to become one of the most-read authors in schools, with works such as Ratburger, about a girl trying to save her pet rat from a fastfood vendor. His seven books have earned him an estimated £15million.
It is hard to begrudge Walliams the success. He appears to have had a confused childhood, being known to his classmates at Reigate Grammar School as Daphne for his supposedly camp manner. At the National Youth Theatre in the early Nineties he met Matt Lucas, his future writing and performance partner – short, bald, Jewish and gay.
For several years the pair wandered the vastness of outer-comedic darkness. A club gig here, a TV cameo there. Little Britain, based on their observations of the places and characters they met, began as a radio show. When BBC3, the corporation’s shaky new digital hannel, offered them a chance to put it on screen, they couldn’t say no.
In his autobiography, Camp David, Walliams deals unsparingly with the misery of his early years in showbusiness. “Living without love or affection was becoming more and more unbearable,” he writes. “Every day the self-loathing would grow. Death seemed the only answer.”
Sexually confused and socially awkward, he entered into a series of destructive relationships, most notably with Caroline Aherne, the actress.
“Caroline sober,” he recalls wistfully, “is the sweetest, kindest, gentlest, most loving person you could ever meet. However… the alcohol poisoned her mind.”
And then he met Lara. First spotted, aged 13, by a model agency scout on the Paris Metro, she had tried to lose weight by drinking.
Another widely-aired theory last week was that the pair were simply too busy ever to see one another, but that is not the picture Lara painted in a recent interview. “I like the feeling of belonging somewhere,” she said, “and finding your place in the world. I don’t really enjoy parties. David and I don’t really drink – he likes it more than me. This week we are in every night – that’s good for me.”
It sounds remarkably like the life David always wanted. The truth may be that, far from being too different, the rich, brilliant and beautiful Walliamses were really too alike.