After Freudian split, novelist Esther finds new love -- in the pub
HER great-grandfather, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, claimed our romantic relationships are modelled on childhood bonds with our parents.
And novelist Esther Freud suggested her own father — the late celebrated artist Lucian Freud — was the cause of her marriage breakdown to actor David Morrissey.
‘What was most important to him was work,’ explained Esther, 58, whose bohemian childhood formed the basis of her acclaimed novel Hideous Kinky, which was turned into a 1998 film starring Kate Winslet.
‘So in my relationships with men, I never felt I had the right to be more important than work.’
Now, however, I can reveal that Freud has found love again — and, happily, her new boyfriend is an academic whose job won’t involve leaving her for months on end.
He is Gerry Simpson, 59, a law professor at the LSE. ‘Yes, we are [a couple],’ he tells me.
They made their first public appearance together this week at a preview party for an art exhibition, Cheerio: 48 Hours With Francis Bacon, at the Tristan Hoare Gallery in Fitzrovia.
They first met at a North London pub, with Simpson paying tribute to his new girlfriend in the acknowledgements section of an academic book published last year.
He wrote: ‘All of this would have been impossible without the lucky break I experienced when I first met Esther Freud one wintry evening at The Flask in Hampstead Village.’
Born in Aberdeenshire, Simpson was married to fellow lawyer and LSE lecturer Deborah Cass, with whom he has two daughters. Cass died of cancer in 2013, aged 53.
Freud separated from Morrissey in 2019 after 26 years together, 13 of them married. With his brooding good looks and her fascinating family history, they were one of society’s most celebrated showbusiness couples.