Michael Winner: the ideal age to marry is 76, darling
Lifelong bachelor Michael Winner is finally going to say 'I do'.
Finally: Michael Winner is engaged to be married for first time, pictured with his fiancee Geraldine Lynton-Edwards Photo: REX FEATURES
Michael Winner seems under the impression that he’s about to marry Michael Caine, instead of Geraldine Lynton-Edwards, who has been waiting more than 50 years for the privilege.
We are sitting in the private cinema in Winner’s 40-room mansion in Holland Park, and he is telling me he can hardly wait for the pre-wedding day buffet at Michael’s house (“Michael has a wonderful taste in food”), the wedding breakfast (“we’ll go to the Wolseley or possibly the Ritz or whatever Michael wants”). And then there’s the wedding outfit. “Michael Caine said to me, 'At our age, we should only wear what’s comfortable.’ ”
You can’t blame Winner for being slightly off-kilter. You sense the Caine references are a form of Dutch courage. After all, the decision to marry Geraldine at the Chelsea Register Office on September 19 is a massive falling away of the scales for this confirmed bachelor, who turns 76 in October. Even when he became engaged to Geraldine in 2007, he quipped, “Don’t hold your breath for the wedding!”
But now, here in the screening room, sitting in front of the Michael Winner Spitting Image puppet and framed by hundreds of photographs of the stars of his movies – Diana Dors, Charles Bronson, Marlon Brando – he’s struggling to explain how his road to Damascus came about.
“There is a dawning of reason even in a mind as befuddled as mine,” he says with a sudden Basil Brush guffaw, before adding with a beam: “They say a leopard cannot change his spots, but that is not strictly true. I’m now a leopard without spots.”