Ballroom dancing, surfing, skiing, boxing and basketball… just some of the many skills listed on the acting profile of Beau Minniear, the hunky American dating singer Ellie Goulding.
Beau, 28, a James Dean lookalike originally from Utah, can also play the drums, piano, guitar and ukulele, as well as being a talented rapper and bass singer.
No wonder Ellie, 38, has fallen head-over-heels for the young actor, with whom she is now expecting a child – as dramatically revealed when she bared her baby bump on the red carpet at the Fashion Awards in London last week.
The pair have since been spotted at the airport, en route to America, where Beau affectionately rubbed Ellie’s back as they checked in for their first-class flight. A source told The Mail on Sunday they are ‘very much in love’, adding: ‘He’s a real romantic, and they’re very sweet together. It’s really lovely to watch. She’s very happy.’
One wonders, however, in the six months the couple have been together, whether Beau has shared everything with his British girlfriend.
For the talented performer, who has a string of indie films, theatre roles and commercials under his belt, also happens to have a criminal record.
The Mail on Sunday can exclusively reveal that in 2018, aged 20, Beau was arrested in Palm Beach, Florida, where he was living at the time. The incident led to him being charged with three offences: robbery without a firearm, felony battery resulting in a serious bodily injury, and marijuana possession.
According to documents filed by the West Palm Beach Police Department, Beau and two other young men were taken into custody after an altercation on a street at around 2.30am.
A 36-year-old man claimed to have been kicked and punched multiple times by a group of attackers, while lying on the ground, leaving him with a fractured elbow and bleeding nose.
According to the police records, he claimed that they also ripped off his trousers and stole his wallet, which was found in the possession of one of the men Beau was with when they were arrested.
According to address details filed with the police, the victim – who also has a criminal record – was homeless at the time.
In a mugshot taken after his arrest, Beau, dressed in a blue-and-purple plaid shirt, looks downcast and remorseful, his hair hanging greasily over his forehead. He was the only one in the group charged with a drugs offence, having been found with seven grams of marijuana in his pockets.
Having served two days behind bars at the County Jail, Beau admitted misdemeanour battery, a lesser offence than felony battery, as part of an apparent plea deal.
Appearing in front of a jury in November 2018, he was granted probation and ordered to pay $675 (£500) in costs.
He also had to complete a 12-hour online anger management course, and was ordered to do 75 hours of community service at a minimum of ten hours per month over the following year.
This wasn’t, however, Beau’s last brush with the law.
In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter riots in Los Angeles – two days of unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota – he was arrested again.
Along with 4,000 others, the then 23-year-old was taken into custody for breaching the 8pm curfew that had been imposed on the city to quell the violence. No further action appears to have been taken, and he was apparently released without charge.
Given that Ellie is expecting his first child, one must presume that Beau has told her about his chequered past.
The singer split from her husband Caspar Jopling, with whom she shares a four-year-old son, Arthur, in February last year. Since her relationship with Beau went public in September, the pair have holidayed together in Italy, where Beau shared online an intimate photograph of Ellie lying in an unmade hotel room bed.
He also appears in several raunchy scenes in Ellie’s latest music video, Destiny.
In one, the pair passionately kiss while wearing veils over their heads; in another Ellie takes pictures of Beau’s semi-naked body before straddling him. She playfully captioned a behind-the-scenes clip on her TikTok profile: ‘Bring your bf [boyfriend] to work day,’ adding: ‘He upstaged me tbh [to be honest].’
It marks quite the change for the British songstress, who just six years ago married Eton-educated art dealer Caspar in a fairytale ceremony at York Minster.
In attendance were Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, long-term friends of Ellie – who is also close to Prince William and Prince Harry, with whom she was once romantically linked.
But Beau’s circle could not be more different.
Caspar, 33, who studied at Oxford and Harvard and once rowed for Team GB, grew up in the Grade II-listed Frickley Hall in Yorkshire and is worth a reported £6.3million.
Beau, by contrast, the youngest child of Scott and Annie Minniear, grew up with his sister Cecilia (known as ‘Cheech’) on a ranch on the outskirts of Park City, Utah.
In a 2023 interview he told how he spent his childhood ‘surrounded by nature and animals that my dad would get on [internet marketplace] Craigslist for really cheap’.
He added: ‘Those animals were something to bounce the ideas off – I was talking to them like a little crazy kid. So maybe performing for them in the woods is where it all started for me.’
Ellie also had a rural start to life. Born in a council house in Lyonshall, a village just outside Hereford, near the Welsh border, she has described having a difficult childhood ‘based on survival’ after her father, Arthur, an undertaker, walked out when she was just five years old.
Her mother, Tracey, worked at the local supermarket to raise Ellie, her two sisters and brother, and finances were tight. Tracey went on to remarry a lorry driver whom Ellie ‘loathed’.
The family relied on Ellie’s grandmother for handouts, and things once got so bad that the bailiffs knocked on the door to take away the TV.
As a girl, locals remember her as ‘a fish out of water’, working odd jobs in a hairdresser and pub, and although she had a passion for music, she failed her A-level in the subject. She went on to read drama and theatre studies at university but quit in her final year.
Things weren’t quite so tough at home for Beau, a decade younger than his new girlfriend. His father is chief executive and founder of a successful healthcare technology company, and his mother is a former air stewardess.
Social media posts show he had a passion for skateboarding as a child, and took family holidays across America and Europe.
He continues to be close to his family, especially his sister, and has shared several pictures on his Instagram account with his silver-fox, lookalike father.
But despite his happy home life, Beau struggled to fit in at school – and it was here that his clashes with authority began.
‘At school, I never really clicked with the drama kids; I never could quite see myself with them,’ he said in a 2023 interview, his only one to date. ‘And I never clicked with the football kids either.
‘I would bounce around, get into a lot of trouble and I got suspended a bunch. I had no respect for discipline or authority at all.’
As a youngster, he admitted, he also had something of a temper.
‘I always thought that being a man was about anger and that raw quality of someone like Marlon Brando,’ he said.
Beau was a ‘bad boy’, say his friends on Instagram, where his profile has just 15,000 followers – a fraction of Ellie’s 13.6million.
He attended the Salt Lake School for the Performing Arts from the age of 14, appearing in several productions, including The Importance Of Being Earnest, A Christmas Carol and Legally Blonde.
When his family relocated to Florida, he did too, before moving to Los Angeles to hone his craft aged 18.
David Gray, who teaches acting in Burbank, remembers the young hopeful at classes, describing him as a ‘super-talented and driven young actor’.
When approached by the MoS last week, David knew nothing about his student’s arrests.
‘Beau always presented as somewhat cool and edgy… but he is the furthest thing from a bad boy,’ David said. ‘We found him to be super-sweet, honest and altruistic.’
Beau credits an LA-based drama coach named Jordan Chappelle for teaching him that acting can be a therapeutic experience.
‘I see this environment as a safe space for me to explore the emotions that I used to get in trouble for, without the repercussions and the shame and the guilt,’ he has said.
With his Hollywood career yet to hit the big time, little is known about Beau’s dating history – and he seems to prefer it that way.
On one Instagram post, he has written: ‘The less they know the better.’ Another bears the cryptic description: ‘All bite, no bark.’
The young actor is certainly well-connected, however.
A picture taken last December shows him aboard a plush private jet with Johnny Depp.
The American actress Sydney Sweeney has also liked one of his posts, in which he’s throwing a punch at the camera, his open shirt revealing a rippling torso.
It is not known how or when exactly Beau and Ellie met.
Beau moved to New York in 2023, where he is believed to rent a one-bedroom apartment in the trendy Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood. Ellie, meanwhile, reportedly sold her £3.1million London townhouse last December and spends lots of time travelling for work, including to and from America.
It wasn’t until February 2024 that the singer revealed she and her husband had split after four-and-a-half years of marriage. But rumours that the couple were living apart were swirling as long ago as June 2023.
She was briefly linked to Lord (Zac) Goldsmith, before being pictured kissing surf instructor Armando Perez, 30, during a break in Costa Rica in early 2024.
In a statement released at the time, she said she and Caspar had ‘privately separated some time ago’, but remained ‘the closest of friends’ and committed to co-parenting their son.
Beau and Ellie have been liking one another’s posts on social media since April, despite not going public with their relationship until September – so it appears they have known one another for at least eight months.
As a friend revealed of the couple: ‘They have a lot of shared interests, like exercise and art.’
He’s also broadened Ellie’s horizons. Speaking to NME magazine last month, she said: ‘I’ve been really inspired lately because my boyfriend loves classical music. I was amazed that he was introducing me to songs that I didn’t know.’
Describing the breakdown of her marriage as ‘a separation of all separations’, she added: ‘I don’t have any urge to be mysterious at the moment.’
Proudly showing off her bump in a crop top on the red carpet last week, that much is clear.
Although he was with her in London at the time, Beau did not attend the awards – and the pair have yet to make an official appearance as a couple.
As for how they feel about the impending new addition to their family, none of the Minniears responded to attempts to contact them last week. It’s not known if Ellie has met Beau’s parents, who live in Florida, or his sister, based in San Francisco, or if he has had any contact with her family or son.
If appearances are anything to go by, the loved-up pair seem blissfully happy – and completely unconcerned by what others may think of their whirlwind romance.
