Besotted Mr Bean star Rowan Atkinson to become dad again at 62 after years of divorce and money strife
TAKING part in that unforgettable opening ceremony at London’s Olympics, actor Rowan Atkinson was on top of the world.
The Mr Bean, Blackadder and Maigret star was happily married, worth a fortune and adored by his son and daughter — who he drove to school in one of the world’s most expensive cars.
Life should have been about to get a whole lot easier for the rubbery-faced actor who had just decided to retire Mr Bean.
Instead there followed five years of personal turmoil.
His 20-year marriage fell apart, his finances took a big hit, and he had to bring back his lucrative comedy creation.
He also found love again. Just months after wowing billions of TV viewers as Mr Bean at the 2012 Olympics, Rowan fell for gas-fitter’s daughter Louise Ford.
The 33-year-old, who plays Kate Middleton in TV comedy the Windsors, is now expecting his baby.
And in a few weeks’ time, 62-year-old Rowan will embark on another round of sleepless nights and nappy-changing.
A friend said: “Rowan and Louise are over the moon and can’t wait for their new arrival.
“It’s a very happy time for them both.”
Heavily-pregnant Louise was pictured shopping yesterday near their £4.6million cottage in London’s Hampstead Heath.
‘It’s a very happy time for them both’
They have lived there, along with their pet spaniel, ever since Rowan’s marriage fell apart.
In that time he has seen his personal fortune reduced by at least £15million following his divorce from Sunetra Sastry, 56.
Rowan bought Sunetra a £21million mansion in Chelsea just before their divorce, which went through on the grounds of his unreasonable behaviour.
The settlement is thought to have cost him another £5million.
In 2015 he sold his beloved McLaren F1 sports car — which he famously crashed twice — for £8million.
He also sold the family’s idyllic home in the Oxfordshire countryside for nearly half a million less than the asking price.
Friends believe his romance with Louise — who looks strikingly similar to how Sunetra did 30 years ago — has put a strain on his relationship with his daughter Lily, 21. Despite Rowan spending £16,000 helping Lily launch her career as a jazz singer and burlesque performer, she now uses her mother’s maiden name, calling herself Lily Sastry instead. It probably didn’t help that Rowan fell asleep last year during her raunchy debut in front of an audience.
Just before the Olympics, Rowan decided to retire Bean, the character that had earned him £11million and grossed more than half a billion pounds at the box office.
He had also enjoyed great commercial success with two Johnny English films about a bumbling spy.
The first in 2003 took £150million as did the 2011 sequel.
But Rowan said then: “The stuff that has been most commercially successful for me — basically quite physical, quite childish — I increasingly feel I’m going to do a lot less of.
“Apart from the fact that your physical ability starts to decline, I also think someone in their fifties being childlike becomes a little sad. You’ve got to be careful. I just feel I’m getting too old for it.”
But in the wake of his marriage collapse he was forced to bring back Mr Bean — in a lucrative Snickers advert.
Then in 2014, ITV announced a new animated series of Bean with Rowan doing his voice.
And earlier this year, hundreds of millions of cinemagoers saw him in a movie only shown in China but for which he was paid handsomely.
Despite not being able to speak a word of Mandarin, he agreed to appear in Top Funny Comedian.
There were issues on set with language difficulties but co-star Guo Degang explained: “We communicated just with facial expressions and gestures.
“We seemed to understand each other.”
What’s more, a third Johnny English flick is scheduled for release in October next year.
Once Rowan’s fortune was upwards of £70million with some estimates putting it closer to £100million. But the latest figure from the Sunday Times Rich List is much less — £56million.
Compiler Rob Watts confirmed last night: “He would be significantly better off financially were it not for his 2015 divorce.”
A friend close to Rowan added yesterday: “In that summer of the Olympic Games he was looking forward to easing up.
“His career was at its peak, but he wanted to step back from work and enjoy the fruits of his decades on screen. For the last six years he had been working on creating the home of his dreams — a designer house in Oxfordshire in 16 acres, where he could live in peace with his wife and kids, who were growing up, and his fabulous car collection all under one roof.”
But his life changed suddenly in late 2012 when he was cast in tragi-comedy Quartermaine’s Terms, at Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s Charing Cross Road.
To rave reviews Rowan played Sir John Quartermaine, an elderly teacher at an English-language school for foreign students.
During rehearsals and the two-month run he fell for Louise — 29 years his junior — who played Anita, a teacher with an adulterous husband. Little-known Louise, a grammar school girl from Bexley, Kent, had studied at RADA with Gemma Arterton and Tom Hiddleston, but she was still playing minor roles.
Rowan was besotted.
Yet at the time it was thought his marriage to Sunetra was one of the strongest in showbiz.
He had met Sunetra, the daughter of an Indian engineer from Ealing, West London, when she was Stephen Fry’s make-up artist on the second series of Blackadder.
Fry, who was best man at their wedding, recalls in his autobiography: “Sunetra was bright, funny and as captivatingly alluring as any girl I had met for years.
“I was quite seriously considering asking her out on a date when Rowan timidly approached me one morning during rehearsals and asked if I would mind swapping make-up artists with him.
“I said ‘Don’t you like the one you’ve got?’ ‘N-no, it’s not that, she’s splendid’.”
They got married in New York in 1990 and as his career took off, they brought up their two children Ben — now 23 and an Army officer recently passed out from Sandhurst — and Lily in a former rectory in Waterperry, Oxfordshire.
‘She was bright, funny, captivatingly alluring’
In 2006 the couple bought another house nearby.
They demolished that pile and had plans to create a glass and steel mansion, which disgruntled neighbours complained was a “monstrosity” looking like a “space age petrol station”.
Although the modern house is finally completed nobody appeared to be living there at the time of print.
The old rectory was sold last year for a knockdown price after it had been on the market for 18 months.
The imminent arrival of Rowan and Louise’s baby marks the end of five years of upheaval.
Friends say they are even delighted at the prospect of smelly nappies, midnight feeds and temper tantrums.
One thing’s for sure — with a face as brilliantly comic as Rowan’s, he’ll be perfect for telling bedtime stories to their little bundle of joy.