£90m rock star leaves wife...then moves in w ith fan
IRON Maiden lead singer Bruce Dickinson has moved in with a super-fan in Paris after separating from his wife of 29 years.
The 61-year-old heavy metal star started dating fitness instructor Leana Dolci this year after she spent around ten years following his band.
Dickinson quietly separated from second wife Paddy Bowden – the mother of his three children – last year. The couple are understood to have no immediate plans for divorce – but if legal proceedings begin, he will have to carve up his estimated £90million fortune.
Miss Dolci, who is believed to be 15 years younger than Dickinson, calls herself a ‘flower child with a rock-and-roll heart’. She regularly interviews rock stars for online
‘I fancy the lead singer’
channel Duke TV and recently attended a heavy metal festival wearing a top with the slogan: ‘I fancy the lead singer.’
Dickinson rarely discusses his private life and declined to write about his marriage in his 2017 memoir What Does This Button Do? But in a recent interview with Argentinian newspaper Clarin, he confessed that he now lives in Paris ‘with my girlfriend’.
A source said: ‘Leana has always been a huge Iron Maiden fan, following them around for nearly ten years.
‘She and Bruce have got really close over the past year and she has even met his children. Paddy is in South America having some space from it all.’
In 2015 Dickinson’s singing career almost ended when he was diagnosed with Stage 3 throat cancer after being told he had two tumours – one was the size of a golf ball – on his tongue.
He had nine weeks of chemotherapy and 33 sessions of radiation before being nursed back to health in the home he shared with Paddy in Chiswick, west London. Six months later he was given the all-clear.
Dickinson told Rolling Stone magazine how surviving cancer changed his outlook on life, saying: ‘Living is living now, every minute, every second, for right now.’
While promoting his autobiography, he told BBC Radio 2 that he has tried to keep his family life largely out of public view.
‘There’s no need for it, really,’ he said. ‘So I made the decision that, in amongst not being horrid to people... I also don’t want to tell confidences about other people’s lives.’
Iron Maiden formed in east London in 1975 and have sold more than 100million albums, making them one of the most successful heavy metal bands of all time.
Dickinson, who left the band for seven years in the 1990s, is also a beer brewer, a script writer, a novelist, a radio presenter and a worldclass fencer.
He also has a commercial pilot’s licence and flies the band’s Boeing 757, named Ed Force One by fans, on tour. The singer was previously married to Jane Dickinson for four years from 1983.