Penny Lancaster: what it’s like being married to Rod Stewart

When Penny Lancaster met Rod Stewart in the bar of the Dorchester Hotel in 1999, after a friend dared her to ask for his autograph, romance was the last thing on her mind. He was 53 with two marriages behind him. She was a 27-year-old, middle-class, part time model and photography student from Essex.

"I wasn’t a fan. And I definitely wasn’t thinking of a relationship because I was coming out of a long-term one, which wasn’t easy," she recalls. "Rod was such an unknown entity. 

"There were a lot of times after that night when I thought, 'What the hell am I getting myself into?'  But Rod’s world was a vortex and I was sucked in."

After a bumpy start – Rod was disentangling himself from a fling with model Caprice Bourret – the couple have been rock-solid, married for 18 years, with two sons, Alastair, 19, and Aiden, 14.

They have navigated the initial suspicions of Rod’s family and friends ("They were, 'What’s her angle?' I was just… 'I like the guy!'") and his six children by four women ("Whatever decisions Rod made with exes, I was always very inclusive with them, making sure they didn’t see me as a threat").

Early on, Rod announced he didn’t want more children, but Penny made it clear she wanted to be a mum. If he’d stuck to his guns, would she have left him? "Yes. And that would have been very hard. But we just went with the flow." Eventually he relented, only for Penny to miscarry.

To conceive Aiden, the couple had IVF during which Rod had to eschew his trademark tight pants for boxers to stop his sperm overheating.

"Now Rod always says, 'I wish I’d said yes [to babies] earlier, because then we could have had more children.' Even five years ago we were talking about adopting, but it ended up not happening. We thought there might be too much of an age gap."

Now Penny is happy with her two boys, although she says, "Actually, I have three because there’s another big baby who needs my attention in a different way."

She laughs. "I think all women would say that about their husbands."

Rod now has five grandchildren by his children Kimberly, Ruby and Liam. Meanwhile, Alastair, who’s pursuing a filmmaking career, has just appeared on a list of the 100 sexiest Londoners ("He’s a gorgeous boy, but also very kind and very polite like his father") and Aiden’s at school.

All this, plus much more, is documented in Penny’s gripping new memoir Someone Like Me – some of it glamorous, such as boogying with then Prince Charles to Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?, some very tough, such as Rod being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2016 (he received the all-clear three years later).

She also describes in the book how she was reduced to tears by a ‘menacing’ Gregg Wallace during her 2021 appearance on MasterChef.