The Wives And Husbands Of Famous Rock Stars
The life of a rock star can be a hard and lonely one, but it isn’t any easier for the partners waiting for them back home when they’re on tour. Being without the one they love for months at a time is harder than many people realize, and that’s even if they don’t engage in the typical rock star behavior that strains and breaks relationships.
Although some of these people have entertainment careers of their own and others prefer to keep their lives relatively privately, all of them are well-known by these artists’ biggest fans.
Bianca Jagger
Born Blanca Pérez-Mora Macías, Jagger was the only person that Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger has ever married in his life, as that wasn’t a step he had taken with past partners like Marianne Faithfull or his current partner of over a decade, Melanie Hamrick.
Jagger had been married to the singer for seven years during the ’70s, at which time she was known as a prominent socialite who especially frequented New York’s famous Studio 54 nightclub. Although she was once an actress, she’s currently heavily involved in many international human rights organizations, including the Council of Europe, Amnesty International, the Amazon Charitable Trust, and the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation.
Yoko Ono
Although she’s best known as the widow and collaborator of Beatles legend John Lennon, Yoko Ono was making avant-garde multimedia art before she had ever met him. Her versatility has been astounding since the beginning, as she made now-classic strides in performance art, literature, and experimental film by the time she was 31.
She was also known for making music with the Plastic Ono Band, which is deeply respected in underground music circles, even if her penchant for screeching vocals was off-putting for many. Although she was infamous for breaking up The Beatles, rock historians (and the remaining Beatles) have since largely agreed that any role she may have had in their breakup was greatly exaggerated at best.
Skip Johnson
Although Jefferson Airplane lead singer Grace Slick had multiple marriages during her time with the band, the most long-term of them tied her to lighting designer Skip Johnson. Altogether, Slick and Johnson were married for 18 years between 1976 and 1994.
By the time of her divorce from him, Slick had retired from the music business and started becoming a visual artist, which she had turned to mainly as a means to cope with the end of their relationship and a house fire she experienced around the same time. Nonetheless, Johnson was seated next to her when he attended a ceremony honoring Jefferson Airplane with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Valerie Bertinelli
Although she’s been a prominent actress since co-starring in One Day At A Time as a teenager, Valerie Bertinelli was also in a high-profile marriage with virtuoso guitarist and Van Halen band leader Eddie Van Halen for 26 years. They had a son named Wolfgang together in 1991, but Bertinelli filed for divorce in 2005 after four years of separation. It was finalized in 2007.
Nonetheless, Bertinelli seemed to maintain good relations with the Van Halen family, as Van Halen’s bandmate and brother, Alex — an ordained minister — officiated her wedding to Tom Vitale in 2011. This couple would also divorce by 2022.
Francesca Tomasi
From 1997 to 2022, Francesca Tomasi was married to James Hetfield of the legendary metal band Metallica. Although Hetfield cited irreconcilable differences in his divorce filing with her, he also credited Tomasi for a great deal of his personal development over the years.
While speaking to NPR, he recalled that his angry, destructive tendencies early in their relationship proved embarrassing for both of them. As such, he said that she did a lot to help him mature as a person and to deal with his anger in a more constructive way.
Dean Wetter
Dean Wetter is the husband of Ann Wilson, the lead singer of the band Heart. According to Rolling Stone, the two briefly dated in the ’80s after Wilson’s sister and bandmate, Nancy, introduced them. However, it wasn’t until decades later that they reconnected and then married in 2015.
Unfortunately, there wouldn’t be harmony in the Wilson sisters’ families for long, as ABC News reported that Wetter pleaded guilty to two counts of assault following an incident in August 2016 that saw him react violently to his twin 16-year-old nephews leaving an RV door open during a Heart performance in a Seattle, Washington suburb. Although Wilson remains married to Wetter, the incident strained her relationship with her sister for about three years.
Maureen Wilson
In the same year that he joined Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant married Maureen Wilson November 19, 1968. While that meant they celebrated the band’s biggest successes together, their relationship was also marked by a terrible tragedy.
Although the couple had two sons and a daughter together, their son Karac would pass away from a severe stomach illness at the age of five in 1977. Four years after having their third child, the couple would divorce in 1983. Wilson is the only wife Plant ever had but the awkward truth is that he would have a son with her sister in 1991.
Olivia Harrison
Although George Harrison’s first wife, Patti Boyd, had a storied love triangle with him and Eric Clapton, the late Beatle was married to his second wife, Olivia, for far longer, as they married in 1978 and remained together until his death in 2001.
She frequently assisted Harrison while he was recording, and both supported his fight against a redevelopment in Hawaii and founded the Romanian Angel Appeal organization, which provided aid to Romanian children left abandoned in the wake of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s overthrow. She was also credited for intervening with a fireplace poker and a heavy lamp after an intruder stabbed Harrison multiple times at their British estate in 1999 before attacking her.
Jim Gillette
Between 1988 and 1993, Jim Gillette was the lead singer of the glam metal band Nitro and garnered respect for his impressive six-octave vocal range. However, it’s also fair to say that he’s perhaps better known for marrying legendary rocker and former Runaways guitarist Lita Ford.
They were married for 17 years between 1994 and 2011. They also collaborated together frequently in the latter years of their marriage, to the point that Ford felt she had to release a “true” comeback album after divorcing Gillette, as the 2009 album they released together was closer to his sound than hers.
Ali Stewart
Although Ali Stewart and U2 lead singer Bono have been married since 1982, they had actually known each other since they were 13. Soon after they became friends, Bono lost his mother, which left him emotionally overwhelmed and lashing out at his father and brother. Stewart cared for him in this aftermath and grew so close that they began dating in 1976.
Stewart was by Bono’s side as he broke into the music industry and they married in 1982 once U2 began seeing success. They have since remained married for over 40 years.
Kim Anderson
Although Fleetwood Mac singer and solo artist Stevie Nicks had multiple high-profile relationships — a couple of which were the subject of the band’s classic 1977 album Rumors — she has only been married once in her life. It was to this man, Kim Anderson, and the marriage only lasted three months.
As Nicks later explained, this marriage was based on grief after Anderson lost Robin Anderson, who was Nicks’s best friend at the time. Since they came to realize that their marriage wasn’t based on love for each other, both would eventually regard their nuptials as a big mistake.
Sharon Osbourne
Although Sharon Osbourne has been an active media personality ever since the successful family reality show The Osbournes debuted in 2002, she had already attained some notoriety as the wife and manager of Black Sabbath singer and overall metal legend Ozzy Osbourne.
On the show — as before — she presented herself as the voice of reason for her chaotic husband, which seemed especially difficult during his most hedonistic and unpredictable years. That said, controversy has often followed her as well, particularly when she departed the talk show The Talk following a heated argument about Meghan Markle.
Meabh Flynn
Although artistic progressive rock star Peter Gabriel has been married twice, the current and most long-term of his marriages has been to Meabh Flynn. After marrying in 2002, they have remained together for more than 20 years.
Flynn was born in Ireland and married Gabriel on the Italian island of Sardinia, but little else is publicly known about her. This is likely because Gabriel is known to be an intensely private person, and she doesn’t seem any more inclined to sacrifice her privacy to the world’s prying eyes.
Polly Samson
After working behind the scenes in the publishing industry starting in 1988, Polly Samson wrote short stories for BBC Radio 4 and got her first novel published in 2000. By the time of that achievement, she had been married to Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour for six years.
She had met Gilmour during Pink Floyd’s Division Bell tour and since former lead singer Roger Waters had been out of the band for almost a decade by then, Gilmour was their leader. This put Samson in a position where she could write lyrics for Pink Floyd, but has done so more regularly on Gilmour’s solo albums in their 30+ years of marriage.
Barbara Bach
By the time Barbara Bach married Ringo Starr in 1981, The Beatles had been disbanded for over a decade. Instead, the couple met by co-starring in the 1980 movie Caveman. Most famously, she portrayed Russian spy Anya Amasova in the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.
For the first decade of their marriage, both Bach and Starr faced addictions to alcohol, while Bach was also in the grip of narcotics. However, both have remained sober ever since a four-week stay at a rehabilitation clinic together in 1988. She was then compelled to co-found the Self-Help Addiction Recovery Program in 1991 alongside George Harrison’s former wife, Pattie Boyd. Bach is also fluent in Italian and can speak French and Spanish conversationally.
