She was once voted the world’s 17th most eligible bachelorette, but I hear Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter Kiera has a new leading man.
The model, actress and skincare ambassador, 42, has gone public with her Swiss financier boyfriend Mauricio Safdie.
They could be seen kissing in this picture she shared online of them on holiday with her family.
‘He usually likes to be private,’ Kiera tells me. ‘We met through mutual friends in Switzerland.’
Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter Kiera kissing her new Swiss boyfriend Mauricio Safdie while on holiday with her family
The model, actress and skincare ambassador says she wants this romance to be for keeps
She’s gone through her fair share of heartbreak. Her former fiancé, the French financier and photographer Count Alexandre de Basseville, was slapped with a ten-year prison sentence for money laundering and drug-dealing.
Understandably, Kiera wants this romance to be for keeps. ‘Hopefully, he’ll put a ring on it,’ she says.
Pal making a dream LA office for Barbie
Margot Robbie lived in the picture perfect Dreamhouse while starring as Barbie. Now the Aussie actress is having her world reassembled by designer Dara Huang, mother of Princess Beatrice’s stepson, Wolfie.
The two took a selfie together at a private gathering hosted by Margot, who turned 34 last week, at The Roof Gardens private members’ club in London.
Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley watching the Wimbledon men’s semi-finals on Centre Court
‘It’s an honour helping Margot’s team design her dream house, or in this case Barbie’s dream office in LA,’ writes Dara, 41, who refers to Margot as her ‘girl crush’.
Margot is believed to be expecting her first child with husband Tom Ackerley, 34.
When Bacon met his Waterloo
What would Francis Bacon have made of life in 2024? More than a decade ago one of his triptychs sold for £110 million, but the question is prompted not just by the astronomical sums his paintings now fetch, but by an entry in a diary — as yet unpublished — from 50 years ago.
‘FB and I became transfixed by the horror of the Eurovision Song Contest,’ recorded Richard Chopping, illustrator of the James Bond book covers, whom Bacon regularly visited In Wivenhoe, Essex.
‘[It was] finally won by two ghastly Swedish girls singing a song called Waterloo.’
At least Bacon, by dying in 1992, spared himself ABBA Voyage, the virtual tour in which Anni-Frid and Agnetha — and Benny and Bjorn — materialise via hologram.
Cleo gets the cream in the country
Appointed as an aide by Boris Johnson’s policy guru Dominic Cummings in 2019, Cleo Watson, 35, described her role at Downing Street as being Boris’s ‘nanny’ during lockdown, rather than a powerbroker.
And since leaving two years ago, she has drawn on her experience to write two steamy bonkbusters, Whips and Cleavage.
But now she has moved away from Westminster and has been getting down among the cowpats, milking the countryside for some gold-top romance.
Boris Johnson’s former adviser Cleo Watson (right) has moved to the countryside and is now writing a novel about young farmers
She is now churning out a novel about young farmers, inspired by some dates she had with a dairy hand.
‘Instead of bringing flowers or chocolates or anything like that, he’d always bring a jug of milk straight from the cow,’ Cleo gushed. ‘It had like three inches of cream on top. It was utterly delicious.’
A far cry from the wine, spirits, pizza and birthday cake served at No 10.
The perfect Foyle
Murder and death are common currency to millionaire children’s author and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz.
But the Foyle’s War creator’s obsession with the gruesome side of crime actually made him stop seeing his shrink.
‘I went to a couple of sessions,’ he told me, at the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards last week. ‘And I only found it interesting in so far as I thought that the guy who was giving me the therapy would make a good character in a book and would probably end up dead by chapter three — so that was the end of my therapy sessions,’ he said.
Could be the perfect foil for a new book series . . .
A former houseboy to fuchsia-haired fashionista Dame Zandra Rhodes has revealed she used to send postcards to her plants, rather than him, when she went on holiday.
Fellow designer Jon Lys Turner, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, documents his time working for the now 83-year-old diva in the Eighties in his forthcoming memoir, St Stephen’s Gardens.
‘My job was to see Zandra’s life was operational without her having to deal with anything. In fact, exactly what a wife would do, except sleep with her.’ Charming.
Rake who really did settle down
He lived his youth — and, indeed, some of his middle age — at such a gallop that he helped inspire one of Jilly Cooper’s lustiest characters, Rupert Campbell-Black, who bounds through her Rutshire Chronicles in unstoppable style.
But the just published £2m will of the thrice-married Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire — ‘Mickey’ Suffolk to friends — suggests he was speaking the truth when saying he’d ‘settled down in the end’.
The first ‘discretionary beneficiary’ is listed simply as ‘Linda’ — Linda Paravicini, former wife of Viscount Bridport, who married Mickey in 1983 and with whom he found complete happiness right up until his death, at 87, in 2022.
The Mozart Effect — the claim that playing his music to babies boosts their brainpower — has been largely debunked.
But Camilla Kerslake, wife of former England rugby captain Chris Robshaw, says her classical singing is influencing their unborn son’s musical tastes.
‘When I sing on stage, he whizzes around in my tummy,’ the soprano, 35, tells me at the Royal Opera House’s Thurrock Trailblazer event, where she sang Der Holle Rache as the villainous Queen of the Night from The Magic Flute.
‘But, as soon as I start ‘Evil Queening’, he goes very small and quiet,’ she adds. ‘I like to think he’s listening, but he might be hiding,’ explains Camilla, who is 37 weeks pregnant.
Face it – Moore’s law for Lefties
Charles Moore raised eyebrows when he said Olivia Colman, who played Queen Elizabeth in Netflix’s The Crown, has a ‘Left-wing face’. Colman labelled his comments ‘absurd’.
Now the former Daily Telegraph editor feels vindicated by a new face in town.
Charles Moore has cited Green co-leader and newly elected Bristol Central MP Carla Denyer as an example of a ‘left-wing face’
He writes: ‘Sticking doggedly to my theory that there is such a thing as a Left-wing face, I ask you to contemplate pictures of the Green co-leader and new MP for Bristol Central, Carla Denyer.’
Moore said a Left-wing face ‘is something to do with looking slightly resentful and ironic at the idea of having to play a public role which satisfies the demands of others.’
(Very) modern manners
Ticketholders in the Royal Box at Wimbledon on Tuesday were delighted by yet another perk on top of lunch in the Clubhouse, tea and free drinks.
Stephen Fry could be seen indulging in a large bucket of sweets that was being shared among the esteemed guests. Advantage Fry!
