Paula Yates approached her 40th birthday last April with characteristic bravado and defiance. But behind the bold words lay the wreckage of her recently, incorrigibly, luckless life: the apparent suicide of her lover Michael Hutchence in a Sydney hotel room, the revelation that former Opportunity Knocks presenter Hughie Green was her father, a protracted custody battle with her ex-husband Bob Geldof. The woman once described as "a smart girl who made a career out of pretending to be an airhead" was said to have spiralled into despair; lonely, afraid of the future.
Yates was born in Colwyn Bay on April 24th, 1960, and brought up in the North Wales village of Rowen, near Llandudno. In her autobiography, she described her mother, the Bluebell dancer and actress Heller Thornton-Bosment, as "absent" for large portions of her childhood.
After an itinerant childhood, overshadowed by abandonment and infidelity, Yates claimed to have experimented with sex and heroin at an early age. She left school at 16, and moved to London, where she became involved in the emerging punk scene.
Besotted with Bob Geldof, then the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, after meeting him at a party, she followed the band around on tour before beginning a relationship with him. The pair eventually married in Las Vegas in 1986, having been together for 10 years. She appeared to revel in the outrageous and the exhibitionist, posing naked in London's Reform Club for Penthouse magazine, and publishing a book of photographs, called Rock Stars In Their Underpants, which was described by Andy Warhol as "the greatest work of art in the last decade".
After a brief foray into music journalism, in 1982 she began co-presenting the cutting edge music show The Tube with Jools Holland. Renowned for her dizzy, flirtatious television persona, Yates seldom received credit for the qualities that made her a more substantial person. Widely read, with a quick wit and sharp intelligence, she was also a devoted partner and mother to her extravagantly-named brood, Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches and Pixie.
In 1992, Yates began presenting Channel 4's Big Breakfast, made by Geldof's television company, Planet 24. It was her speciality to conduct her celebrity interviews from a bed, and it was there that she met Australian musician Michael Hutchence, of the band INXS, whom she described as "God's gift to women". She left Geldof for Hutchence a year later, and they divorced in 1996.
Yates's and Hutchence's daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, was born in August 1996. Yates was gloriously happy with her new life, but her relationship with Geldof remained acrimonious and, following her arrest for alleged drug offences, he won temporary custody of his three children. Yates was devastated when Hutchence was found hanged by his belt in a hotel room in Sydney in November 1997. She refused to accept the inquest verdict of suicide.
Following the startling public revelation of Yates's true paternity, one friend observed: "In the space of a month, Paula has lost her future, and her past."
A year later, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with depression, She lost custody of Fifi, Peaches and Pixie, and two months later apparently tried to hang herself.