David Walliams looks bemused at NYFW with Lara Stone

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• published: 05 Mar 2015
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David Walliams looks bemused at NYFW with Lara Stone David Walliams looks bemused at NYFW with ex-wife Lara Stone. Even by the louche so-called standards of the fashion industry, they are the most arresting of images. Supermodel Lara Stone, instantly recognisable with her gap teeth and pale blonde beauty, grapples admiringly with pop singer Justin Bieber, 20. The Calvin Klein campaign — which features both of them partly naked and exhibiting an apparently molten mutual sexual desire — rolled out in January this year all over billboards, glossy magazines and in a filmed advert, too. He squeezes her thigh, and lies on top of her. She slips her hands into his jeans, slack-jawed with arousal — or at least a simulation of it. A few weeks later, around the release of the over-hyped bonkbuster Fifty Shades Of Grey, another set of pictures of Lara Stone were released by i-D magazine. Again chiefly naked, this time the supermodel was depicted getting to grips with actor Jamie Dornan, aka the movie’s eponymous hero Christian Grey. What can her husband David Walliams have thought of it all? Yesterday, it appears, we got our answer as it emerged that their marriage is over, after a little less than five years. Lara Stone, 31, left the marital home in North London on Tuesday night, taking their 22-month-old son, Alfred, and their dog, Bert, with her. Sources indicate that Walliams, 43, is ‘devastated’ that she has left him and is hoping against hope for a reconciliation. A source close to the funnyman said: ‘He is so devastated that he won’t accept that it is really over. He doesn’t seem to want to take it in. That is what he is concerned to get across, that as far as he is concerned they may still make it up. But the fact is, she has gone — and it’s done.’ The source added: ‘He has been completely besotted by her.’ However, speaking to friends of the couple yesterday, it seems that as far as Ms Stone is concerned, there is no prospect of a reconciliation. One said that the situation was ‘already quite acrimonious’ and that this was ‘not a happy split’. He added: ‘Lara has had enough.’ An associate of Walliams, who has often spoken of his struggles with depression and suicidal impulses, told me: ‘There have been big problems with the marriage for longer than you might think. ‘Certainly, I was aware of the schism around six weeks ago. He didn’t broadcast it, but his friends were made aware that they were in a difficult place, that the marriage was in trouble. He is very sad about it but has been putting on a professional front.’ Perhaps they hoped the crisis would blow over. In any case, care seems to have been taken to cover up the problems in the marriage. Walliams joked when the pictures with Bieber appeared in January: ‘Why has someone photoshopped Justin Bieber’s head onto what is clearly my body?’ Walliams has, of course, long been used to his wife featuring in sexy advertising campaigns, but maybe this no-holds-barred flirtation was rather a different matter. For Bieber was widely reported to have asked Lara out on a date during the making of the adverts, apparently not realising that she was married. And those same reports suggest that while she turned him down, she was not remotely offended by being asked — and that they worked happily together even after he made his move. One fashion magazine source told me: ‘She has been really sexing it up lately, while she and David have not been spending any time together. It has made the issues between them very obvious. People are speculating that David is really, really jealous and insecure about her.’ It seems that the comedian and presenter has always been acutely aware of his wife’s great beauty. There was uneasy laughter at their first dance at their wedding in May 2010 — which was to the theme tune from Disney’s Beauty And The Beast. As Walliams told an interviewer: ‘The thing about beauty is you do feel it is very compelling, because you hope that it rubs off on you in some way.’ Walliams and Stone became an item in September 2009, several months after they first met. He had sent her flowers and asked for a date, but she hadn’t responded at first. She said: ‘David had been pursuing me, then he stopped and a few months later, I thought maybe we should go on a date. We got on really well, fell in love and the rest is history.’ Within weeks, he seemed to have decided he’d found ‘the one’, inscribing a gift tag at Christmas to Lara’s mum: ‘To my future mother-in-law.’ He proposed to her by, unusually, putting a £100,000 diamond ring inside a burger in January 2010. She apparently always lifts the bun to take out the salad — so he knew she would find it. They were married in May 2010 at Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair with a reception afterwards at Shoreditch House in East London.