Here’s some news that might have had Fawlty Towers star Andrew Sachs chuckling with delight.
I can reveal that the late actor’s granddaughter Georgina Baillie is to wed a 1980s pop star 28 years her senior.
Her husband-to-be is Rusty Egan, 68, who founded New Romantic band Visage with Midge Ure and is best known for the hit Fade To Grey.
‘We are engaged,’ confirms Georgina, 40, who tells me: ‘We are planning the wedding.’ Sadly, Sachs, who played hapless Spanish waiter Manuel in the classic sitcom, won’t be among the guests as he died in 2016 aged 86.
I disclosed ten months ago that Georgina was going out with Egan, for whom it will be a third wedding. The musician has a daughter with his first wife, Miranda, and three sons with his late second wife, Penelope.
Rusty has given artist Georgina an engagement ring containing a large sapphire. ‘He wanted it to match my eyes,’ she says of the stone.
Georgina revealed in 2021 that Russell Brand had paid for her rehab after ‘Sachsgate’, the scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday in which the comic and Jonathan Ross taunted Sachs about Georgina’s relationship with Brand, leaving revolting messages on his answerphone. They were played on Brand’s BBC radio show in 2008.
Georgina has been sober for more than five years. She has said of her fiance: ‘Rusty helped me do things I never thought I could without using or drinking, like going to gigs.’
My children aren’t nepo kids, insists Sadie Frost
Sadie Frost insists the success of her children with ex-husbands Gary Kemp and Jude Law has nothing to do with their connections.
‘I haven’t had friends of friends give them jobs and things like that,’ says the film-maker, 60. ‘They’ve had to audition and work hard.’
Sadie had her eldest son, musician Finlay, 34, with first husband, Spandau Ballet star Gary, and then actor Rafferty, 29, model Iris, 25, and aspiring filmmaker Rudy, 23, with actor Jude, to whom she was married for six years.
‘I always taught them to be driven, whatever they did, but get educated – go to music college, go to university,’ she says.
Rafferty’s first acting job was aged 13, playing a young version of his dad’s character in the film Repo Man.
Iris made her modelling debut as a toddler in Vogue.
Strictly fans drew a collective gasp when favourite Lewis Cope, and his partner Katya Jones, found themselves in the quarter finals dance-off at the weekend, before being voted off by the judges.
But the pair are clearly determined to remain close friends off screen.
Former Emmerdale star Lewis, 30, and the Russian professional dancer, 36, were spotted enjoying a coffee and a bite to eat together at a cafe in south-east London on Tuesday.
Cradling her pet chihuahua, Katya was engaged in intense conversation with Hartlepool-born Lewis, whose girlfriend, Rachel Lopez, was not present.
Yesterday, Katya paid tribute to ‘my magnificent Lewis Cope’ online, gushing that he was ‘the greatest contestant ever’ and had ‘set my little dancing soul on fire’.
During her marriage to the volatile Colin, 3rd Lord Glenconner, she proved herself impervious to all manner of indignity. But this week’s Oldie magazine lunch surely tested Lady Anne Glenconner, 93, to the limit when fellow guest Gyles Brandreth announced that he felt ‘an erotic charge’ in her presence. ‘I’m not much younger than her but I aspire to be her toy boy. I want to be Roddy Llewellyn to her Princess Margaret,’ added Brandreth, 77.
Her invitations to Sandringham are now a thing of the past, but that’s the least of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s concerns as she approaches her fifth Christmas in her native New Zealand since returning ‘for good’ in 2021. The soprano, who came to global attention singing at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, undergoes a hip replacement operation a day or two from now. Not that Dame Kiri, 81, will excuse herself from kitchen duties on Christmas Day. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she trills. ‘Besides, crayfish only take six and a half minutes to cook…’
Wills’ cake gives royal baker a wobbly moment
When Prince William cut a three-tiered chocolate cake this week to mark 20 years as patron of homelessness charity Centrepoint, he didn’t know how close it had come to disaster.
‘It was very hairy,’ admits royal baker Juliet Sear. ‘I made a schoolboy error and didn’t actually dowel the cake in the middle, so it would have collapsed.’ Dowels are rods stuck into the cake to prevent upper tiers from crushing lower ones.
‘Luckily I always give extra time to setting up the cake, so had time to phone up [her assistant] who found all my dowels, my hacksaw, and brought them to me so I could dowel.’
