IS MICK PROOF SOME DO MICK AND ELIZABETH, AGED 22
EIGHT children by FIVE women – and they ALL look like daddy. So what’s the scientific explanation?
WITH eight children by five different women over 47 years, it’s a wonder Mick Jagger, now well into his eighth decade, can keep track of his everexpanding family.
But the 74-year-old Rolling Stone never has any trouble recalling which offspring are his.
Whether it’s eldest child Karis, 47, or one-year-old Deveraux, newest apple of Daddy’s eye, there’s an easy way of working it out: they all look uncannily like Mick.
Despite having five different mothers — 1960s siren Marsha Hunt, Texan model Jerry Hall, philanthropist Bianca Jagger, Brazilian TV host Luciana Morad and ballerina Melanie Hamrick — all of his brood are mirror images of their dad.
From their piercing blue eyes to those trademark dimples, it’s clear the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. What’s more, compare pictures of a younger Mick at different ages to those of his offspring — and it’s almost impossible to tell them apart.
Georgia May, his fourth youngest at 25, is a case in point. From her naturally wild brunette locks to those enviable cupid’s bow lips, model Georgia is the image of her father at her age. Indeed, it’s only since she’s started dyeing her hair blonde that she resembles her mother, Jerry Hall, at all.
James, Mick’s eldest son at 32, shares a mother with Georgia, but he, too, looks only like his dad, as seen in these images of both in sports kit, aged 12. Then, they sported the same tousled hair and gawky expression — and even now share identical full lips and razorsharp cheekbones. In fact, when James, a musician-turned-actor, starred in Vinyl, a TV series about the 1970s music scene, last year, it was like watching retro footage of Mick, so similar were their pouts and sneers on stage.
So what does science have to say: why is every one of Mick’s brood a chip off the old block?
Well, for years there was a theory that children — particularly before the age of five — looked more like their fathers than their mothers. This was said to have a simple evolutionary explanation: the early resemblance could be seen as a primitive way of proving paternity, thereby encouraging the father to bond with the child.
THIS got some backing in 1995, when a study in Nature magazine showed that people were better at matching photographs of one-year-old children with pictures of their fathers than their mothers.
There’s no denying Mick has quite distinctive assets — those large lips and ears, a wide flat nose, pronounced cheekbones, a rounded chin — and scientists say it’s unsurprising these are passed down to his offspring.
‘Anything that is a striking part of someone’s appearance will give a particular look to their offspring,’ explains Dr Anand Saggar, a senior consultant in clinical genetics.
In general, this refers to darker skin, eye and hair tones as well.
‘If one parent has a much darker skin colour than the other, for example, the child’s skin is likely to be a darker shade [than the paler-skinned parent],’ he adds. ‘The same applies to eye colour — any dark colouration will be inherited to some degree.
‘Particular features, such as eye shape or lip size — and Mick Jagger has some very unique features — are the same. It’s like putting a drop of coloured paint into a pot of white: you only need the tiniest drop to change the base colour.’
Look at the striking shot of Gabriel, 20, another of Jerry’s children, as an 18-month-old: the scrunched-up, chubby face and rounded chin look remarkably like his dad’s at that same age.
Or the resemblance between 18year-old Lucas, Luciana Morad’s only child with Mick, and his father at 18: the hair, hooded eyes, long nose with its flat base and flared nostrils — he couldn’t be anybody else’s son.
When it comes to parental resemblance, geneticists also talk about