Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow and husband Chris Martin are separating after 10 years of marriage, they have announced yesterday.
The actress broke the news on her Goop lifestyle website, writing: ‘It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate.’
Gwyneth, 41, and Coldplay frontman Chris, 37, have two children, and in their emotional, somewhat bizarrely entitled, statement called ‘Conscious Uncoupling’, they admitted they had spent more than a year battling to save their marriage.
They wrote: ‘We have been working hard for well over a year, some of it together, some of it separated, to see what might have been possible between us, and we have come to the conclusion that while we love each other very much we will remain separate.
‘We are, however, and always will be a family, and in many ways we are closer than we have ever been.
‘We are parents first and foremost, to two incredibly wonderful children and we ask for their and our space and privacy to be respected at this difficult time.
‘We have always conducted our relationship privately, and we hope that as we consciously uncouple and coparent, we will be able to continue in the same manner.
The couple are said to have escaped to Eleuthera in the Bahamas with their children before the announcement was made on Gwyneth’s website.
The letter was signed off by writing ‘Love Gwyneth & Chris’. Shortly after posting the statement, the website crashed.
Gwyneth and Chris, who wed in a secret ceremony in Mexico in December 2003, have spent most of their 10-year relationship trying to avoid being photographed together in an effort to maintain their privacy.
Last year, they moved from London to Los Angeles and were only recently pictured looking like a happy family as they took their children Apple, nine, and Moses, seven, out and about in the sunshine.