David Bailey enjoyed marriages to beautiful women including film star Catherine Deneuve and model Marie Helvin.
But the celebrated photographer’s son Sascha Bailey tells me he was so unhappy during his own marriage that he began the formal process to become a woman ‘as an escape from the trauma’.
Last year, I disclosed that Sascha, 29, an art curator, had ‘fled’ Tokyo after the collapse of his ten-year marriage to Japanese lawyer Mimi Nishikawa, who is a decade his senior.
As I disclosed last month, the now-estranged couple lived together in Tokyo until October 2022.
Now, he tells me: ‘I ended up going trans before I left Japan. Before I left, I lost it completely and I thought that I wanted to be female.
‘I am actually officially transgender, according to the Japanese government.’
Sascha — whose mother is Bailey’s fourth wife, Catherine Dyer — explains: ‘It was an escape from the trauma.
‘I thought I had a second personality called ‘Sue’ that was female. ‘She’ [Sue] protected me.’
Although he registered as transgender in Japan, he did not undergo any transitional medication or surgery. And he is no longer considering changing his gender.
‘I didn’t do anything, not even hormones,’ he confirms, adding: ‘But I was prescribed them, I still have the doctor’s notes and the [prescription] box.’
Sascha is now going out with Lucy Brown, who is a former media assistant at Canadian media platform Rebel News and later worked for far-Right activist Tommy Robinson. She has since disassociated herself from Robinson.
Lucy told me last year that Sascha, whom she befriended online before he left Japan, was ‘very lost’, seeming ‘almost shell-shocked’ and ‘almost fearful’ of Mimi upon his return.
Mimi did not respond to my request for comment.
No-show for poorly soprano star De Nise
More turbulence in the career of Danielle de Niese. I hear the soprano has pulled out of La Boheme at the Royal Opera House this month and next ‘while she recovers from recent illness’.
Last summer, she withdrew from a production of Poulenc’s Dialogue Des Carmelites, being staged at Glyndebourne, the Sussex opera house where her husband, Gus Christie, is executive chairman.
It later transpired that de Niese, 44, had taken a starring role in a new West End production of Aspects Of Love, the hit musical written by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Gus insisted: ‘Danni will be back at Glyndebourne next year for the season.’
Let’s hope so.
How action man Statham gave me the silent treatment
Hollywood hardman Jason Statham’s action movies have generated billions in box-office takings since he first appeared in Guy Ritchie’s films more than 20 years ago, outstripping fellow British stars such as Idris Elba and even James Bond star Daniel Craig. But he clearly doesn’t want to shout about it.
When I tried to speak to him at the London premiere of his latest film, The Beekeeper, a colleague told me Statham, 56, was ‘having a vocal rest’.
Obviously he’s the strong but silent type.
Playing drug boss takes its toll on Sofia
Sofia Vergara suffers for her art. The actress, 51, who became the highest-paid woman in U.S. television when she earned $19million for starring in sitcom Modern Family, has been left with chronic back pain after playing drug lord Griselda Blanco in a forthcoming Netflix drama.
‘I changed my posture, which I thought was a brilliant idea until the third month when I tried to get out of bed and got stuck,’ she tells me at a VIP screening of Griselda at the Mayfair Hotel in London.’ She adds: ‘They had to inject me because my back gave up. The doctor was like: ‘You’re crazy, you can’t do this at 50′. But it was worth it.’
She grew up under a dictatorship, her husband was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis just seven years after their marriage — and her art was often dismissed, leaving the family broke and desperate.
But the scale of Paula Rego’s triumph over adversity is now revealed by the publication of her will, 18 months after her death aged 87. It discloses that the Portuguese-born Rego left £42million — exactly the sum left by Lucian Freud, once her tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art.
The first-ever artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, Rego, who was made a dame in 2010, worked in her studio six days a week, with opera playing before lunch and Frank Sinatra or Portuguese fado afterwards, ending the day with a glass of champagne.
She bequeathed everything to her three children, Caroline, Victoria and Nicholas — unlike Freud who left nothing to three of his acknowledged brood of 14.
Naomi Campbell, who once declared that she had made the term ‘anger management’ famous, now takes pride in channelling her inner peace.
The notoriously irascible supermodel, 53, showed off her flexibility as she did a shoulder stand during a women’s-only yoga class at the £300-a-month FitnGlam gym in Dubai.
Campbell, who has two children, says it’s her ‘happy place’.
Tranquillity was in short supply when the late Lord Glenconner was on the scene, whether throwing a tantrum or reaching inside his trousers to tear off part of his paper underpants and munch the resultant fragment.
But soon there will be a serene new space on St Lucia, to which Glenconner decamped from Mustique, the Caribbean island to which he’d lured Princess Margaret, Sir Mick Jagger and numerous Guinnesses. Michael Jacques, 67, a Londoner of St Lucian heritage, tells me he’s building a chapel on land which became the subject of intense dispute between him and the Scottish peer.
The chapel, adds Jacques, is ‘to celebrate good over evil — a thank-you to Jesus for giving me the strength to keep Lord Glenconner from taking it from me’.
James Parker is a UK-based entertainment aficionado who delves into the glitz and glamour of the entertainment industry. From Hollywood to the West End, he offers readers an insider’s perspective on the world of movies, music, and pop culture.
