It’s over already! Tim Rice splits from the lover 38 years his junior who’s having his baby
‘I can’t go on having babies, I’ll be bankrupt’
THE far-flung village on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall where Sir Tim Rice spends much of his time is usually the sleepiest of retreats. But recent events in his complicated private life have sparked a flurry of gossip among the locals.
In fact, there has been talk of an ‘engagement’, no less, between the revered lyricist and a woman named Dr Laura-Jane Foley, who is 38 years his junior. The reason is that the 33-year-old brunette has confirmed — to general astonishment in Sir Tim’s social circles — that she is expecting his baby.
However, those subscribing to the notion that wedding bells are just around the corner had better not rush out to buy a hat.
For in an extraordinary twist to an already astonishing story, it can be revealed that the romance in question is already over.
Laura-Jane — a friend of Prince Harry’s ex Cressida Bonas — hinted as much when she said last weekend that the relationship was ‘complicated’, adding: ‘Yes, Tim is the father, but I don’t wish to comment any further.’
Now she tells me: ‘I became pregnant in January and the relationship ended at the end of February. The baby is due in October.
‘Despite my natural distress at the ending of the relationship, I am looking forward to being a mummy to my already muchloved child. I will make no further comment on this private matter.’
Her friends suggest that Sir Tim is so spooked by the idea of becoming a father again aged 71 that he ended the relationship.
It’s quite a tangle and friends of Sir Tim, who is still married to wife Jane, from whom he has been separated since 1990, say that he has also been left bowled over and bewildered by a very modern — and very brief — romance.
The idea of having a baby with a lover nearly 40 years his junior is, it seems, a shock to the system of this cultured and moneyed man, who already has three children by two women, and seven grandchildren.
As one female acquaintance of long standing told me this week: ‘Tim is a very sweet man but he is also a person who wants total secrecy, total loyalty and total freedom.’
Happily for Sir Tim, hits such as The Lion King and Jesus Christ Superstar have seen him amass a fortune of £150 million, so he will not have a problem supporting the new arrival.
In recent years, his conquests have included socialite Amanda Eliasch, 54, with whom he has been dallying for eight years.
She was married to the boss of sports gear firm Head, and following their divorce she got a settlement said to be almost half his £400 million fortune.
She and Sir Tim are believed to still see each other regularly and care for each other very much.
Indeed, on her Twitter feed on Monday, she wrote cryptically: ‘Shakespeare was so right in his sonnet when he said: “Love is not love which alters when alteration finds.” My love is steadfast.’
What can all this mean for Laura-Jane, whose respectable, religious parents Patrick and Christine live in a village in Cheshire? (She once claimed that her father was so devoutly religious that he had been a monk.)
According to social media sites, Miss Foley — who lives in a £1.4million West London mews house — seems very busy. She has recently had lunch with rolypoly actor Christopher Biggins and posted a picture of him cradling her bump. Also, she has advertised the fact that she is staging arts exhibitions and writing occasional articles.
Interestingly, her romance with Sir Tim is not her first time she has been close to older men. While at university, she was a protege of TV talent agent Mike Hollingsworth (who was married to presenter Anne Diamond).
While editor of the Oxford University magazine Isis, where she studied for a masters degree, she chose Hollingsworth as an ‘Isis Icon’ — alongside former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Hollingsworth, who is 70, now says she remains a ‘close pal’.
Earlier, as a Cambridge undergraduate, she targeted the libidinous artist Lucian Freud — then in his 80s — asking to interview him for the student paper Varsity in 2004.
She said: ‘He declined but suggested meeting anyway. So we did. That meeting was the beginning of an association, which took me through doctoral research focused on him. I am really interested in how Freud used people to make art before casting them aside.
‘And I wanted to do the same, or, do the opposite, I wanted to use him to create something.’
Certainly, she exploited her time with Freud — reputed to have had 500 lovers — to the maximum. She wrote a successful play about him, the gist of which was that Freud tried to entice a virgin student into a dangerous liaison — a nude sitting.
As Laura-Jane later recalled of their meeting, they drank vintage champagne at his home for hours and then he drove her to meet his friend, the artist Frank Auerbach.
The evening ended at 3am with an invitation for her to sit for him, which she turned down.
After a production of her play, An Evening With Lucien Freud, was staged in London last year — with Cressida Bonas cast as the virgin student — LauraJane was invited onto the panel of a Sky Arts game show.
She is a regular at the celebrity haunt the Groucho Club in Soho, and is on its quiz team. She is also curating a Shakespeare exhibition at the nearby Ivy Club.
Always very media-savvy, while still a student, Laura-Jane took part in a Channel 4 TV show called Faking It. The idea was for her to be transformed from a goody-two-shoes choral student — a self-declared ‘virgin’ aged 20 — into a rock chick.
However, she disliked the resulting programme which showed her refusing to have her hair cut and being somewhat snooty with her supposed mentor.
She was engaged to barrister Rupert Beloff, who was ten years her senior, but that petered out some time ago.
So how did she come into Tim Rice’s orbit? They first met 15 years ago at an event in Cambridge, but the romance only happened after she sent him flirtatious tweets last August out of the blue. It seems Sir Tim was flattered by the attention.
He tweeted about having met someone who didn’t know him ‘from a bar of soap’. She then duly made some puns about brands of soap, and they cheerfully traded soap puns.
Then, in November, they exchanged views about the plot of Downton Abbey. And from that beginning, a romance was born. Laura-Jane tells me that it was a ‘happy and loving relationship’.
They began dating in November according to her pals, and she told him in January that she was pregnant. Her camp say that it was not a secret affair and that
She says it was a ‘happy, loving relationship’
she even met his children. Other friends of his claim that the romance was never the exclusive affair which Laura-Jane believed, and that there were only a handful of encounters.
Whatever the truth, he is now in a state of some shock. At the end of February, Sir Tim put his home in Barnes, South-West London, on the market for £6.25 million, though this was not thought to be for financial reasons — although he has apparently muttered: ‘I can’t go on having babies, this is going to bankrupt me!’
One factor is that his former lover, Nell Sully, by whom he has a teenage daughter, Zoe, has moved out of the area.
As for Laura-Jane, I’m told he hopes to reach an amicable financial settlement with her and then resume his life as a single man. Certainly, he enjoys the freedom to date attractive women. He is understood to have an unsaid agreement with ex-wife Jane — who he still loves — that they won’t divorce.
He broke up with the Army colonel’s daughter after it emerged that he’d had a 12-year affair with singer Elaine Paige, who played Eva Peron in the sensationally successful musical Evita.
In a recent interview, Elaine explained: ‘The wedding bells idea did chime for me — but you have to remember he was extremely married at the time. And still is.’
Jane duly dumped Rice and filed for divorce in 1990. Their decree nisi was granted, but neither has ever applied for the decree absolute. ‘Why bother?’ Jane recently said.
For his part, in his autobiography Sir Tim remarked of Jane: ‘I felt she was the most beautiful woman I had ever met. I still do. Why am I reminded of that Bob Dylan song, I Threw It All Away?’
Nevertheless, he has never been short of female company as he divides his time between the house in Barnes and his home in Cornwall — where he remains close to two of the most important women in his life. Nell Sully has her own property on the same estate in Cornwall, which allows him to see a lot of daughter Zoe.
Cosily, estranged wife Jane lives in the next village in a Tudor manor house with her long-term partner, and often visits Rice.
Indeed, Jane accompanied him (and their grown-up children Eva and Donald) when he received his knighthood in 1994.
Rice likes to gather his extended family — including grandchildren — together. Once a year, they all join up at his 33,000-acre estate in Wester Ross, in the Highlands, which is much loved by Jane. As daughter Eva said some years ago: ‘I’ve never hated Dad for a minute for anything he’s done — and I’ve never blamed him for anything that happened within our family.’
So, it looks as if the latest episode in romeo Rice’s life-story will be understood by all his family.
His affair with Laura-Jane fitted the serendipitous nature of many of his romances.
For example, his relationship with artist Nell Sully began after she was hired to paint a mural at his house.
After they split, he was linked to journalist Gina Rozner who had interviewed him. They carried on a romance for around a year until 2003 when she dumped him. She complained that the casual basis on which he saw women was too much to bear.
‘It was simply a case that we each had totally different agendas. He is a multi-millionaire who would want to see me, say, once or twice a week. And that would be that. But I was looking for something else.’
Next came a love affair with writer Isabelle Duncan, who played for his cricket team, The Heartaches.
Thirty years his junior, they met in the Long Room at Lord’s. Isabelle, who went to Charterhouse School, had great hopes of her romance but although they lived together for a time, they are no longer an item.
It’s an exhausting procession of romantic dramas for debonair Rice, who tends to woo interviewers with a certain languorous charm.
The only passion he will admit to now is one for cricket. He is said to sleep with a copy of Wisden, the sport’s almanac, by his bed.
But as he said, this very English game is a metaphor for life. ‘Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Mostly, though, you’re lucky if you come away with a draw.’
You have to wonder in which column the scorers at his favourite Lord’s cricket ground would record a turn of events that, in his eighth decade, has knocked Tim Rice for six.
The only passion he will admit to now is cricket