Nora Forster, known for role in punk rock scene, marriage to a Sex Pistol

Nora Forster, a German-born publishing heiress and music promoter who gained fame as the wife of John Lydon — otherwise known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols — and the mother of Arianna Forster, or Ari Up, the lead singer of the influential allfemale punk band the Slits, died Thursday. She was 80.

Her death was announced by Lydon on Twitter. “Nora had been living with Alzheimer’s for several years,” the announcement said. “In which time John had become her full time career.” He did not say where she died.

For more than four decades, music fans knew Ms. Forster as the emotional rock for the evervolatile Lydon, who in the late 1970s became Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of British polite society for spitting invective in every direction, including the queen’s, as the frontman for the incendiary punk progenitors the Sex Pistols.

When the band imploded after its brief, explosive career, he scarcely mellowed; he continued on as the creative force of the fiery post-punk band Public Image Ltd., or PiL.

Because of her husband’s enduring notoriety, particularly in England, Ms. Forster’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease unfolded as a public drama after he went public about her diagnosis in 2018.

“It’s vile to watch someone you love disappear,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times of London in February. “All the things I thought were the ultimate agony seem preposterous now.”

Her illness, he said, had “shaped me into what I am.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over it,” he added. “I don’t see how I can live without her. I wouldn’t want to.”

The previous month, he had teared up when taking a more wistful turn in an interview on the television show “Good Morning Britain” about “Hawaii,” a haunting PiL ballad that he had written as a tribute to her and that was the Irish entry in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. (Lydon was born in England to Irish parents.) “Remember me,” Lydon sang, “I remember you.”

“I can see her personality in her eyes,” he said. “She lets me know that it’s the communication skills that are letting her down.”

Nora Maier was born Nov. 6, 1942, in Munich. After the war, her father, Franz Karl Maier, was a prosecutor who helped bring wartime Nazis to justice. He was later the editor and publisher of the newspaper Tagesspiegel.

Ms. Forster went on to work as a model and to marry singer Frank Forster, who was “kind of a swing pop star, always appearing on TV back in the ’60s,” Arianna Forster said in an interview with the music site Pitchfork in 2009, a year before she died.

As the 1960s unfolded, Ms. Forster promoted West German tours for acts such as Jimi Hendrix and Yes, which gave her prominence on the German rock scene. “People were walking around in the living room back then, like the Bee Gees and all these big groups,” her daughter recalled in the interview.

The bohemian lifestyle of her rock friends eventually ran afoul of local authorities. “In Munich, the police were knocking at the door every night because of the loud acid parties,” her daughter once said. “She was fed up with it. You have to go to London to live that lifestyle.”

Nora Forster did just that in 1970, the same year she and Frank Forster divorced, and by the middle of the decade, she had become enmeshed in the punk-rock scene that was starting to roil Britain and the music industry as a whole.

In 1975, Nora Forster met Lydon, who was nearly 14 years her junior, at Sex, the boundarypushing clothing boutique on London’s King’s Road run by fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren.

The couple married in 1979. And, to the likely amazement of those who considered Lydon a human mushroom cloud, the marriage endured.