Celebrity and daughter of Bob Geldof and Paula Yates
Celebrity and daughter of Bob Geldof and Paula Yates
Born: March 13, 1989; Died: April 7, 2014
Peaches Geldof, who has died aged 25, was the daughter of the singer Bob Geldof and broadcaster Paula Yates and made a career writing for newspapers and presenting television shows. It was a modern life reported and celebrated in social media and reality television, but it was also a difficult life: she was only 11 years old when her mother died of a heroin overdose.
She was born Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof in London, the second of three sisters, all with the famously elaborate names Geldof and Yates preferred; her older sister was Fifi Trixibelle and her younger was Pixie. She also had a half sister Tiger-Lily from her mother's relationship with the lead singer of INXS Michael Hutchence.
Her family life was disrupted when her mother left Geldof to live with Hutchence and the couple were divorced in 1996. Hutchence was later found dead in a hotel room in Sydney in 1997, and Yates went on to lose custody of her three daughters the following year. Only three years later, Yates herself died.
Peaches Geldof attended school at Queen's College in Harley Street, but it was an unusual upbringing, with Peaches herself once saying that she grew up quickly. "I haven't felt like a teenager since I was 12," she once said. "I've felt like I was 30 since I was 13."
By her late teens, she was writing for newspapers and magazines, usually about the travails of being a teenager but also demonstrating wit and skill for a good turn of phrase. She wrote for Elle, The Telegraph and The Guardian.
She then turned to television and fronted a number of series focusing on her life. The first was Peaches Geldof, Teenage Mind in 2005 followed by a reality show for MTV called Peaches: Disappear Here. In 2011, there was also a chat show for ITV called OMG! which was not successful.
She also worked as a model and designer, creating a collection for the fashion label PPO; in 2009 she also modelled for Ultimo, the bra company owned by Michelle Mone, but she was dropped around a year later after allegations about Peaches's drug-taking. She admitted dabbling in drugs but denied taking crack.
She was married twice, the first time when she was 19 to the US musician Max Drummey. They married in Las Vegas in August 2008 and announced they had decided to split amicably in February 2009 before divorcing in 2011.
The following year, she married Tom Cohen, lead singer of London band SCUM, at the church in Davington, Kent, where her parents married 26 years earlier. It was also where her mother's funeral was held. They had two sons Astala and Phaedra - names which Peaches said were upholding the family tradition of choosing ridiculous names for their children. She spent time discussing parenting techniques and was an avid believer in attachment parenting, appearing on This Morning in a head-to-head debate with Apprentice star Katie Hopkins.
She was a heavy user of social media and had to apologise last year for tweeting the names of the two women whose babies were abused by rock star Ian Watkins.
She had broken a court order by naming two women who allowed their babies to be abused by the paedophile Lostprophets frontman in a series of tweets. She tried to explain her actions by saying she had assumed the names were already public knowledge.
The women's names were tweeted to her 160,000 followers after she reportedly read them on a US-based website. She later said: "I deleted my tweets, however, and apologise for any offence caused."
She was interested in religion and was latterly a follower of the Ordo Templi Orientis movement, whose most famous member was the occultist Aleister Crowley, who lived at Boleskine House on Loch Ness.
She is survived by her husband and two sons.
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