MARY Portas rose to fame as the Queen of Shops thanks to her documentaries and best-selling books – and of course her iconic Lego-esque red bob.

But the 63-year-old, who has raised £30million for Save the Children, debuted a new look on Wednesday after being appointed OBE for services to retail, broadcasting and charities.

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Fans likely did a double take after seeing her accept the honor at Windsor Castle, with the television personality embracing her natural gray hair in a longer cut.

After appearing on Channel 4’s Richard & Judy chat show in 2005, Mary has appeared regularly on primetime television and secured lucrative deals through books, TV and private engagements.

She ran four series on the BBC between 2007 and 2010, before jumping to Channel 4 with Mary Portas: Secret Shopper, which followed a similar format.

Most of her TV work sees Mary visiting both independent shops and major chains in an attempt to improve their fortunes with her expert advice.

She rose to prominence for her expertise in visual merchandising and retail strategy, which manifested during her television career.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses for the Watford-born presenter.

In 2019, she split from her fashion consultant wife, Melanie Rickey, describing the divorce as “completely awful” in an interview. The guard.

“I got divorced, I had to sell my childhood home, I had to reset my family with this young son, find another home and figure out how things were going to work,” she candidly shared.

After 17 years together, the couple were forced to sell their £5 million home in London’s posh Primrose Hill and move into separate houses nearby.

At the same time as her marriage broke down, lockdown hit and cost Mary’s consultancy business “hundreds of thousands” of pounds.

Mary ditched the bob during the Covid-19 pandemic after discovering she couldn’t go to the hairdresser to maintain her electric color during lockdown.

For a long time, my red bob was ‘me’. When I was Queen of Shops, that haircut defined me

Maria Portas

“My red bob was ‘me’ for a long time,” she shared on Instagram in May last year.

“When I was Queen of Shops, that haircut defined me.

“But then came Covid, and no visits to the hairdresser, and the bob grew out and the color faded.

“At first I panicked a bit; who was I without the bob?

“But then I realized that this was actually an opportunity for the outside of me to change to reflect what was happening inside.

“When my hair started to change in the first dark days of Covid, I had written Work Like A Woman, I started writing Rebuild and I had changed so much of my personal mindset.

“And so I embraced my new look.”

She urged others to “play, experiment, try new things and have joy” as they grow older.

“Find the look on the outside that matches the richness of all the layers on the inside,” she said.

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Mary rose to fame in 2007 with the start of the TV program Mary Queen of Shops, in which she helped failing high streets.

She was then appointed by then Prime Minister David Cameron to lead an independent inquiry into the future of the high street in 2011.

Mary’s brother Lawrence Newton provided the sperm to conceive Horatio with Melanie’s egg through IVF.

“Honestly, I don’t know which kid is the most high-maintenance!” Mary told the Daily Mail in 2015, adding that she actually finds taking care of her older children more challenging than her youngest.

‘The [then] The 19-year-old is back from her gap year and will be heading to college this fall. I spend so much time providing emotional and loving guidance, it is much more emotionally draining than the three year old!’

Mary also explained her close relationship with her brother Lawrence, who she previously revealed in 2015 fathered her child with Melanie.

‘When you experience the death of a parent, you stick together like glue. So we were always close,” she explained.

“We’re family, that’s it… I’m a mother, I’m a businesswoman, I have kids, I have family, I happen to live with another woman and she had a child who happens to be my brother’s. The more I can normalize that, the better the world will be.”

‘It is much more emotionally difficult to deal with daughters. “I was very happy to have another son,” she admitted.

‘I don’t want to offend my daughter, who I love, but they are all for it. It’s all those emotions that young girls go through.

“From the acceptance of their friends to the way they look, there’s a huge amount of pressure on them that boys don’t have.”

But the unconventional circumstances of Horatio’s conception have their origins long before all this. They are set in the tragic childhood in which Portas was effectively orphaned at the age of 16 – and became a surrogate mother for Lawrence, now the surrogate mother of her child.

When she and her brother first carried the baby into the west London sunshine, outside St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, they could have been forgiven for thinking about this extraordinary life cycle. Or as Portas puts it: ‘I know now that it could only have been Lawrence who was Horatio’s father.’

To fully understand these words, it is necessary to turn back the clock forty years, to the time when the multi-millionaire retail and branding consultant was a feisty sixteen-year-old who dreamed of becoming a famous actress and hoped to take up a career . a place at RADA.

That all changed suddenly and irrevocably when her mother, also named Mary, died of meningitis in 1977.

While Portas’ three older siblings were already on the verge of leaving the family’s dilapidated semi-detached house in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, her grief-stricken father found solace in another woman. Portas had to take care of 14-year-old Lawrence. washes his clothes and feeds him, while she struggles to come to terms with her own broken heart.

She may have achieved celebrity status through her TV series Mary, Queen Of Shops, not to mention her role as an adviser to David Cameron on the future of the High Street, but Portas’s beginnings were far more humble than her rich life today would suggest.

Her parents were immigrants from Northern Ireland; her red-haired, green-eyed mother, Mary Flynn, was a laundress and her father, Sam Newton, was a bus conductor. Both were fiercely ambitious and encouraged their five children to study hard in their Catholic schools.

While Sam later became a factory manager for Brooke Bond, his wife devoted herself to raising her children, Michael, Patricia, Joe, Mary and Lawrence.

The sudden loss of their mother – wrongly diagnosed with menopausal depression even as she was dying – was compounded by the reaction of their father who, after throwing himself over their mother’s body sobbing, declared that there was nothing left to live for. .

However, he quickly replaced his wife with another after meeting office worker Rebecca at a social club for widows and widowers.

He then sold the family home despite the fact that young Mary, who had barely left school, and Lawrence, who was still a student, were still living there. Both became homeless and Mary developed a fierce independence and self-sufficiency that is still so evident today.

Everything in the house was sold or simply disappeared. She has no photos to commemorate her mother, only a cookbook and a statue of a saint.

Despite Lawrence’s love of music, he was actually instructed by his father to join the police force, largely because he would be given accommodation at the training school in Hendon.

But despite her own ordeal, the ever-capable Portas was never far from her younger brother’s side. She quit her course at RADA because she couldn’t cope financially or emotionally, and devoted herself to caring for them both.

In fact, she sacrificed her dreams of becoming an actress to become Lawrence’s surrogate mother, not knowing that one day he would step in and thank her in the most poignant way imaginable, by becoming a surrogate mother for her to become a child after deciding he hadn’t. I don’t want any from himself.

“We are so close,” she told The Times this weekend. “Our bond will never change, will never change.”

Meanwhile, Portas grew up having unequivocally heterosexual relationships and romantic feelings for men she met, eventually marrying chemical engineer Graham Portas after meeting him in a wine bar.

By then, she had achieved significant career success. After attending Watford College Of Art, Portas began her career in retail in the early 1980s with a Saturday job at John Lewis before moving to Harrods where she gained her first experience in window display design.

She moved to Topshop before being poached by London department store Harvey Nichols, where her exceptionally creative window displays made her the talk of London. At the age of thirty she was a board member.

For a while, it seemed that her professional success was accompanied by domestic happiness. Her son Mylo, now 21, was born in 1994. Her daughter Verity, now 19, almost two years later.

But slowly the relationship began to fall apart and the couple divorced in 2003, very amicably, after 13 years of marriage. She has since described those years as “some of the best years of my life… we just grew apart, and that happens.”

It wasn’t long after that Portas met Melanie Rickey, a fashion magazine editor, at a Royal College Of Art dinner, and the pair fell for each other almost immediately.

Until that point, Portas had never considered a relationship with a woman – “I certainly wasn’t a repressed lesbian,” she later reflected – and insists her love for Rickey took her by surprise, adding: “She gives the world complete love . and it’s the most refreshing, beautiful thing there is.’

Rickey also had not come out as gay before meeting Portas. But their relationship soon became both public and serious, making them Britain’s most high-profile lesbian couple.

The couple had a civil ceremony in 2010 and began IVF the following year, with Melanie carrying the child as she was the younger woman.

They were among the first same-sex couples to convert that partnership into marriage on December 9 last year, when Portas took Melanie out for dinner and then surprised her by going to the Westminster Register Office at midnight, where their family and Horatio were waiting for them.

Today they share a £5 million home in London’s Primrose Hill with Portas’ eldest children, Mylo and Verity. Portas’ ex-husband, the first person she told about Melanie, is a regular at the dinner. Melanie also spoke this week about the unusual circumstances surrounding Horatio’s birth and emphasized that she had no qualms about Portas making it public.

“Gay people get married and have children, so I don’t think there’s any downside to sharing the information,” she told the Observer.

“We’re simply sharing something that feels very normal to us as a family, and if it inspires people or makes them think differently – or even if it changes their perception of ‘normal’ – then that can only be a positive thing.”

But while Horatio’s legal mother is Britain’s leading retail and branding expert, his biological father is a bit quieter.

Despite embarking on a career as a police officer, he has recently worked as a bar manager for his eldest brother, successful entrepreneur Michael Newton.

Indeed, Portas and her siblings remain close and very protective of each other.

While Lawrence worked for his eldest brother, he lived for several years with another brother, Joe, in North London.

For the past three months, he has been living with Portas, Melanie and their children in her beautiful London home, where toddler Horatio takes turns addressing each other as Mom, Mom and Dad Lawrence.

But Lawrence is about to emigrate to Bermuda to start a new life with his girlfriend.

Portas, who says she watched her brother struggle for years after their mother’s death, says that as Lawrence coped by taking control and trying to micro-manage everything, “walked away” and “became the hedonist later in her life.

And the anger she felt as a child only grew as her own children grew up. This week, she recalled, “I look at these two kids and think, ‘Jesus! That was me coming home to do all the cooking. That’s you, Laurens. This is simply criminal.’ And I mourned this 14-year-old boy – and I guess I mourned the 16-year-old girl that I was.

‘I had no life for five years. It was a gray world, a very gray world.’

But the anger she once felt toward her father, who died suddenly of a heart attack the same year he remarried and left everything to his second wife, has been soothed thanks to years of therapy, not to mention the birth of Horatio.

Referring to her book, she said: ‘With all the trauma in it, this is a beautiful, happy little world.’

In an extract from her autobiography Shop Girl, published this week in The Times, she uses the present tense as she recalls the existence she and Lawrence built together as teenagers home alone without an adult to guide them.

“Together we have created our own way of being,” she writes. She might as well be describing the present. For while the choices she has made may seem unconventional, it seems clear that after years of private pain, Portas fought her own way to a happy ending that also involved the beloved younger brother she always promised to care for .

Famous Big Brother contestant Louis Walsh is not one to shy away from speaking his mind.

And Tuesday’s episode will show that he will continue to share his outspoken opinions.

In a clip shown on Late and Live on Monday, hosted by AJ Odudu and Will Best, it was revealed that the former X Factor star, 71, has some strong opinions about Sir Bob Geldof.

As the participants gathered in the kitchen in the morning, they talked about certain songs that had been released over the years.

Colson Smith, 25, from Coronation Street, spoke specifically about it, asking: ‘Who wrote it? Bob Geldof?’ to which an unimpressed Louis responded with a “Pfft!”

She tried to coax the answer out of Irish music manager, Marisha Wallace, 38, then asked: ‘Who wrote it? Prince?’

Louis simply nodded his head and when Marisha exclaimed that Prince had written so many songs, an irritated-looking Louis replied, “Yes, he did.”

Sensing that the TV personality was unimpressed, Zeze Millz then said: “I take it you’re not a Bob Geldof fan, Louis?”

Louis, still in his dressing gown, poured himself a cup of tea and didn’t hold back on what he really thought about the fellow countryman who has raised millions for charity.

“Well, I think it’s full,” he said.

He then added: ‘He’s from Dublin. I know little bits. The Boomtown Rats were good.”

Marisha, seemingly shocked by Louis’ reaction, openly apologized in case Bob was watching, to which Louis then angrily exclaimed, “I don’t care!”

Fans shared their thoughts with X – formerly known as X.

One seemed to side with Bob and couldn’t quite believe what they were hearing, writing: ‘How dare Walsh now slam Bob Geldof, the master of the live aid patch.’

Another agreed with the music manager, writing: “Louis is honestly right about Bob Geldof.”

The shocking revelation comes after Louis was spared from elimination this week and will see himself go straight to the finals.

In Monday night’s episode, Fern Britton unknowingly spared Louis after Big Brother tricked her into believing she wanted him deported.

Fern was told to secretly place a red snake on the pillow of the person she wanted to evict.

Later, as the housemates were relaxing in the bedroom, they were told to find an intruder.

Louis was later told by Big Brother that he had been chosen for eviction by a fellow housemate, and so a snake was placed on his pillow.

He was then told to look in the hatch in front of him, where he found a four-leaf clover, meaning he missed the next round of nominations and guaranteed his place in the grand final.

But determined to find out the culprit, Louis vowed to unravel the mystery, convinced it was ‘never the obvious person’.

A typical day for Bob the Drag Queen on Madonna‘S Celebration tour starts with R&R after the trip.

“Traveling can be tiring, but it’s worth it when I can live my dream in front of thousands of fans every night,” says the RuPaul’s Drag Race season 8 winner, 37, shared exclusively in the latest issue of We weekly.

Bob (real name Christopher Delmar Caldwell) has joined Madonna on several Celebration tour dates since its inception in October 2023. On this particular day in his life, Bob was preparing for a performance in Sweden by enjoying some time for himself after exploring Stockholm.

“After a 30-minute walk through the city, I unpack my things and make myself comfortable [my] hotel room,” Bob said Us.

Once at the concert location, Bob gets ready for the show. “I use exclusively the Pretty/Funny eyeshadow palette from my beauty brand BOMO to transform into one of the most graceful women you will ever see,” the TV personality shared.

Scroll down to follow Bob on a day in his life:

Bob Saget’s widow has fought back against people who tried to tell her how to live her life.

Kelly Rizzo, 44, who is dating actor Breckin Meyer, 49, took to social media on Monday to tell followers how she sees the situation.

“The vast, vast, vast majority of all the comments and feedback and support and everything that I’ve gotten since Bob passed away has been 99 percent positive and kind and wonderful,” the Eat Travel Rock host said at the start of the four-minute mark, 30 seconds video.

“But there are people who just like to talk when it comes to dating after your partner has died.”

The Comfort Food with Kelly Rizzo podcast host appeared makeup-free, wearing an oversized tan and black sweater over a gray T-shirt.

“I’ll start by saying, unless you’re a widow or widower, you really have absolutely no place and no right to comment on this because you don’t know what it’s like.”

Bob Saget died in January 2022 at the age of 65 in Orlando after falling and suffering head trauma at his hotel. Rizzo and Saget met in 2015 and married in 2018.

The tour operator said it took more than a year after The Full House star’s death for her to feel comfortable with the idea of ​​dating and that she only started seeing other people 18 months after her husband’s death, but needed support to take the next step. step.

“In my situation, it was Bob’s daughters, Bob’s friends,” she explained. “They said, ‘It’s OK.’ So I thought, ‘Okay, it must be good.'”

Saget shared three daughters, Aubrey, Lara and Jennifer, with his ex-wife, screenwriter Sherri Kramer.

Speaking to those who may have been dealing with the same “incredibly complex, difficult and dynamic thoughts and feelings that are emerging throughout this process,” she said, “there is absolutely no room for judgment.”

‘Everyone experiences it differently, and it is very personal. Whether someone moves on a month later or ten years later, it doesn’t take away from the love and relationship you had with your partner.’

She later opened up about her relationship with Meyer.

The pair made their debut as a couple at a Grammys viewing party in February.

“I was worried about how I was going to move on and find someone who appreciates what I’ve been through and understands that Bob will always be a part of my life,” she explained.

Although she didn’t mention Meyer by name, she said, “I’m very fortunate that I was able to find someone who has room for that, who appreciates it and gets it, and who is strong enough and confident enough to know that Bob will always be . part of my life’.

She said the Happily actor, a divorced father of two adult daughters, “always asks questions about it [Saget] and keeps him part of the conversation, and that means so much to me, because I knew I was going to have to find someone who just got it.”

Managing Director and CEO of Bank of Baroda said the launch of the Bob Earth Green Term Deposit Scheme offers depositors the dual benefits of stable and secure financial returns and the opportunity to contribute to a greener planet.

Bank of Baroda recently introduced BOB Earth Green Term Deposit Scheme to generate funds for eco-friendly projects. Investors can open a Green Deposit account with any Bank of Baroda branch in India.

“The Bank has made great strides in embedding sustainability into its operations, including our approach to risk management, governance, social responsibility and environmental impact,” said Debadatta Chand, Managing Director & CEO of Bank of Baroda, according to Mint.

He stated that the launch of the Bob Earth Green Term Deposit Scheme offers savers the dual benefits of stable and secure financial returns and the opportunity to contribute to a greener planet.

“As one of India’s leading banks, Bank of Baroda is committed to advancing its ESG mandate and strengthening its green finance portfolio,” he added.

Important things to know about Bob Earth Green term deposits

This scheme offers attractive interest rates on various tenors and also helps the country in its mission to have a green and sustainable economy.

Bob Earth Green Term Deposits Interest Rates

This scheme has interest rates of up to 7.15% per year. Investors such as the general public, NRIs, resident Indians and high net worth individuals (HNIs) can invest in the BOB Earth Green Term Deposit Scheme.

BOB Earth Green Term Deposit Tenors Amount

The tenor amount starts from ₹5,000 and one can invest up to ₹2 Crore or less

The Bob Earth Green term deposit scheme: interest rate range

Interest rates

• For 1 year i.e. 12 months is 6.75
• For 1.5 years i.e. 18 months is 6.75
• For 777 days this is 7.15
• For 1111 days this is 6.40
• For 1717 days this is 6.40
• For 2201 days this is 6.40

Bob Earth Green Term Deposit Unique ownership rights

The bank has come up with a number of unique property rights that recall the planet’s climate and sustainability goals, such as

1. A term of office of one and a half years means that the global temperature increase must be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
2. Tenure 1717 days focuses on the United Nations’ goal of 17 sustainable development goals.

Kelly Rizzo has a message for critics who think she moved on too quickly after her husband’s death: Bob Saget.

“I’ll start by saying, unless you’re a widow or widower, you have absolutely no place and no right to comment on this because you don’t know what it’s like,” Rizzo said in a video posted via TikTok on Sunday March 10. “You just don’t understand the incredibly complex, difficult and dynamic thoughts and feelings that arise throughout this process.”

In the four-minute, 34-second video, Rizzo explained that after you lose your partner, when it finally “occurs to you to even think about dating again, just having those thoughts makes you you feel guilty, you feel ashamed, you feel terrible, but yet you also feel lonely, so you want to do it.

Rizzo said she received “support and love” from Saget’s friends and family (namely his three daughters, Aubrey Saget, Lara Melanie Saget And Jennifer Belle Saget) about her decision to start dating again.

@eattravelrock

Reply to @Bnawn Sadness & Dating Chat #mourningjourney #griefsupport #datingadvice

♬ original sound – Kelly Rizzo

She went on to say that even with that support network, you “still feel really weird when you” jump back into the dating pool. “But you still have to feel good about it and have peace in your heart with it,” she said. “Personally, I didn’t get to that point until well over a year after Bob passed away, to even think about it.”

In October 2023, Rizzo spoke openly with Additional about her “survivor guilt” after Saget’s death. However, she admitted that she had reached a point where she was “open” to dating again.

“You feel guilty when you have happy moments or when you don’t feel sad all the time,” Rizzo said at the time. “You feel guilty about that, but then I learned that that is completely normal. Now that enough time has passed, even his girls always say, “That’s stupid. Heavenly Bob wants you to be happy. ”

Rizzo launched her new relationship hard with Ignorant actor Breckin Meyer at the 2024 Grammy Awards in February, two years after Saget’s death. According to Rizzo, Meyer has been nothing but supportive as she continues to grieve her late husband.

“I’m very fortunate that I was able to find someone who has the space for that and appreciates it and gets it, and who is strong enough and confident enough to know that Bob will always be a part of my life,” she said.

Saget and Rizzo married in 2018 after three years of dating. The Full house alum passed away on January 9, 2022 at the age of 65 after being found unconscious in a hotel room in Orlando, Florida. A month later, authorities determined that Saget had died from blunt force trauma to the head.

“They concluded that he accidentally hit the back of his head on something, thought nothing of it and went to sleep. There were no drugs or alcohol involved,” Saget’s family said We weekly in a February 2022 statement.

Now, two years later, Rizzo said that while she still struggles with the loss of her husband, everyone grieves differently.

“It’s been over two years and it’s different for everyone,” Rizzo said via TikTok. “You know how important your loved one was in your life, as long as you honor and honor that, and stay true to your feelings – and you know that you also have the love, support and trust of your partner’s loved one. ones and friends – then you can’t do it wrong.

She added: “It’s not one size fits all. The whole point is that there is absolutely no room for judgment.”

Gigi Hadid just said goodbye to her long hair and hello to a short bob.

The supermodel took over Instagram on Saturday, March 9, to reveal that she has chopped off her signature waist-length locks for a new chin-grazing style, posting a video with the caption, “Dinner and a pork chop.”

The clip was set to Loretta Lynn’s song ‘Act Naturally’ and documented her entire beauty transformation, thanks Chris McMillan. The famous hairstylist was behind it Jennifer Aniston‘s famous ’90s cut known as ‘The Rachel’.

“New version for @gigihadid,” McMillan shared via Instagram on Saturday. “I loved working with Gigi on this new cut. I can’t wait to see the style journey the stylists working with this cut will take .”

In Hadid’s footage of her haircut, the camera immediately zooms in on Hadid, 28, and shows a pair of scissors cutting through her wet hair just below her neck. Moments later, several piles of her blonde locks are shown on the floor before the camera cuts to a close-up of Hadid excitedly awaiting the results as McMillan, 58, puts the finishing touches on the result. The video then ends with Hadid smiling and trying different poses as she sees herself in the mirror for the first time with her new bob behind her ears.

The following day, the fashion icon took a break from a photo shoot for her clothing line Guest in Residence, showing off her wavy short hair in a series of sunny snaps on Instagram. “sunshine and my new ‘do! shooting spring @guestinresidence with loves from me @patrickta @laurapolko,” she wrote alongside the images.

The first shot was of Hadid in a gray knit polo standing in front of a tree with her hair looking effortlessly chic. The next photo highlighted her profile and showed her soaking up the sun while wearing a cardigan, spaghetti strap top and jeans. The final photo showed her wind-blown hair over her face as she was dressed in a yellow shirt, pink and maroon striped cardigan and layered seashell necklaces.

While some may be surprised by Hadid’s drastic hair change, she revealed in a 2021 interview with Harper’s Bazaar that she doesn’t spend as much time worrying about her hair and makeup as she used to since she became a mother.

“I’ve really simplified my routine to just the necessary things,” she told the outlet. “When I work, I obviously do more. But when I’m home, I’m on full-time mom duty. I wake up in the morning, wash my face, moisturize, put on deodorant and like to add fragrance. But if I don’t have time, I don’t wear makeup. My hair is [also] always in a bun so it doesn’t get pulled out.”

Hadid welcomed daughter Khai in September 2020 with ex-boyfriend Zayn Malik. The couple separated a year later, but remain committed to co-parenting. Hadid has since rekindled a romance with him Bradley Cooper.

“Zayn is not happy about it [Bradley and Gigi’s] relationship and it will never be,” a source said exclusively We weekly last month.

However, Cooper, 49, was “a voice of reason” for Hadid. “[Bradley is] sober, and his [advice] comes from his own personal experiences,” the source continues. “Bradley warned Gigi that there is a difference between a healthy divorce and a toxic one.”

By Ciara Farmer for Mailonline

Published: 08:36 EST, March 8, 2024 | Updated: 09:09 EST, March 8, 2024