Bill Nighy has revealed he secretly married after spending years insisting he had never tied the knot.
The Love Actually star, 76, who has been romantically linked to Vogue editor Dame Anna Wintour since 2015, had long maintained that he had never married – including during his 27-year relationship with actress Diana Quick.
But Bill has now given a new account of his romantic life, recalling a time ‘when I was married’ and revealing that he wore a wedding ring which he later lost in the sea.
The actor did not reveal the identity of his wife, when the marriage took place or how long it lasted.
‘I can’t wear rings because I’ve got funny hands,’ Bill said on his Ill-Advised podcast on Thursday. ‘I was called Nux Nighy at school because I had knobbly knuckles.’
He added: ‘When I was married, I had a wedding ring, and I went into the sea and it came off. I had to wear such a big ring to get it over my knuckle that it came off in the sea. I lost the ring.
‘It was the only time I’d ever had a ring, but it was so big, as I say, in order to accommodate the deformity of my knuckles, that it didn’t last long.’
Bill Nighy with actress Diana Quick in 2005, with whom he had a 27-year relationship
In a 2015 interview, Bill said ‘I’ve never been married’ and explained that marriage had not appealed to him when he was younger.
‘There was nowhere for me to go,’ he said at the time. ‘Marriage is sort of back in now, isn’t it? There wasn’t a lot of it about back then.
‘Where are you going to go? I have no God. A register office didn’t sound like much. I don’t think the tax situation was very beneficial. I don’t think anybody would have married me anyway. But it just wasn’t a thing you did.’
Bill’s longest relationship was with actress Diana Quick, 79. The pair met while appearing in David Hare’s A Map of the World at the National Theatre in 1982 and welcomed their daughter, actress and film-maker Mary Nighy, 42, two years later.
They remained together until separating in 2008 but were never publicly known to have married.
In a 2006 interview, Bill joked: ‘If she isn’t my wife, she has been following me around for a hell of a long time.’
But he made their legal status clear on that occasion, adding: ‘We’re not legally sanctioned. We live in what my grandmother would call sin, but I don’t care, and neither does she.’
He and Diana have remained on good terms since their split and continued to spend time together as a family.
The Love Actually star, 76, who has been romantically linked to Anna Wintour since 2015, has now given a new account of his romantic life, recalling a time ‘when I was married’
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Before Diana, Bill was in a relationship with Welsh actress Beth Morris, who later appeared in I, Claudius and The District Nurse.
Bill has more recently faced speculation over his relationship with Dame Anna, 76, with the pair romantically linked since at least 2015.
The rumours gathered pace after they were repeatedly seen together, before making a high-profile appearance arm-in-arm at the Met Gala in New York in 2023.
Bill’s representative denied they were romantically involved, saying at the time: ‘Bill and Anna have simply been great friends for two decades. They are not in a relationship.’
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