Law apologises to fiancee for infidelity

Guardian Unlimited Film | News | Law apologises to fiancee for infidelity:Law apologises to fiancee for infidelity

Maev Kennedy
Tuesday July 19, 2005
The Guardian

Alfie would have snarled and said nothing. Jude Law, after one Sunday paper filled seven pages with revelations from his nanny's diary, issued a public apology in a midnight statement to the Press Association.

Last year critics were lukewarm about Alfie's reincarnation in the sweet-faced Law, an interpretation in which the tailoring was sharper than the dialogue and which lacked the casually brutal misogyny of the role as created by Michael Caine in the 1966 classic film. It was while filming it that Law, then married to Sadie Frost, the mother of their three children, met Sienna Miller, who played one of Alfie's innumerable conquests.

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By the time of the premiere they were the starriest couple on the A-list circuit. They became engaged last Christmas, despite the fact that he and Frost were divorced only earlier this month. At the first night Miller was asked whether Law and Alfie had much in common, and replied: "He's as charming but not such a misogynistic bastard."

That was before the revelations on pages one to seven of the Sunday Mirror from Daisy Wright, about a brief fling which read more as the serial acquisition of hangovers than a grand passion.

At the time Ms Wright was employed by Frost as "the weekend nanny", supplementing the weekday nanny, whose tasks included shuttling the children between homes and film sets in several countries.

Life, not to mention adultery, was evidently complicated by an entourage of domestic staff, personal assistants, chauffeurs and the competing demands of hectic professional and social lives; it was the wife's PA who rang on behalf of her employer to challenge the nanny about the affair.

The saddest line in the Sunday Mirror was not his wistful "I may be Jude Law but at the end of the day I am an ordinary guy", but Ms Wright's naive confession to her diary that she hoped he might ask her to marry him - despite the minor encumbrances at the time of a fiancee and a wife.

Law's midnight apology read: "Following the reports in today's papers, I just want to say I am deeply ashamed and upset that I've hurt Sienna and the people most close to us.

"I want to publicly apologise to Sienna and our respective families for the pain that I have caused. There is no defence for my actions which I sincerely regret."

He ended with the mandatory, and inevitably doomed, plea from celebrities in such a fix: "and I ask that you respect our privacy at this very difficult time".