Tragedy for Aspinall clan as rock wife Amanda dies
WHEN Amanda Aspinall married pop star Daryl Hall, it was seen as the perfect match of British society and U.S. showbiz. However, less than four years after Amanda filed for divorce, she has been found dead at the age of 61. She is understood to have suffered a heart attack.
‘The whole family is deeply shocked,’ a friend of the Aspinalls tells me. ‘The death was very sudden.’ Amanda was the daughter of late gambling tycoon and animal park owner John Aspinall, a close friend of the fugitive Lord Lucan. Her mother was Aspinall’s first wife, the late Scottish model Jane Gordon Hastings.
In 2009, Amanda married Hall, 72, who is in one of the most successful duos in pop history, Hall & Oates, with more than 60 million albums sold. He and Amanda lived for a time in London’s Chelsea and he seemed to enjoy her social connections, boasting in an interview in 2012 that his wife was related to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer.
‘I travel in unusual circles,’ Hall said. ‘George Osborne and his wife, Frances, are my cousins.
‘But I’m not gonna talk politics with George.’
Amanda had two children, March and Orson, with her first husband, Cosmo Fry, a hotelier and heir to the Fry’s chocolate dynasty. Their children, who are now grown-up, became so close to Hall that her daughter, March, joined her in performing backing vocals on two songs on his 2011 solo album, Laughing Down Crying.
‘I have an English family and I’ve lived in England for years,’ Hall said the following year.
‘They’re extraordinary people, and I have a great family.’
However, Amanda filed for divorce in August 2015 in Connecticut, where the couple lived at the time with her children, reportedly claiming that the marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’ in court documents. Her parents’ marriage ended when she was eight years old and they underwent a bitter divorce on the grounds of her mother’s adultery.
Her father, known as Aspers, was one of society’s most mercurial characters and established the Clermont Club in Mayfair, where ‘Lucky’ Lucan and Sir James Goldsmith gambled.
Aspinall won custody of Amanda and her brother, Damian, and forbade them from seeing their mother again. The casino, and the safari parks he set up in Kent, are now run by Damian.