1999 AT THAT TIME: Penny Lancaster opens up about the extreme challenges she faced in her journey to marry Sir Rod Stewart

Penny Lancaster has shared a look back at her earlier days, confessing that she suffered from crippling self-doubt during the start of her relationship with her now-husband, Sir Rod Stewart.

After meeting purely by chance, as she asked the Scottish singer for an autograph while at the Dorchester Hotel, London, in 1999, it wasn’t until months later that Sir Rod would finally make the decision to call her.

However, after the music legend did finally get in touch with her, this would mark the start of a relationship that has now spanned decades and produced two children.

Speaking to The Sun’s Fabulous magazine, Pennylooked back to 1999 when she first started dating Sir Rod, revealing that she was initially filled with self-doubt about his previous partners: “When I began dating my now-husband, singer Rod Stewart, 80, in 1999, I imagined the perfect women he had been with and how he was comparing me to them.”

While she later accepted that he didn’t do that at all, she admitted that she had become conditioned to analyse herself: “Of course, he wasn’t. He always gave me the most incredible compliments, but I had become conditioned to analyse myself.”

She explained how she even went so far as to constantly apologise: “I’d apologise to him – and strangers – for everything from my crooked toes to my sweaty palms, which I get because of overactive sweat glands.”

However, struggling near the beginning of her relationship with the rock-and-roll star, the pair have seen their relationship go from strength to strength over the years. After meeting six years earlier, the couple welcomed their first son, Alastair, in 2005, before their second, Aiden, followed in 2011.

Away from her family life, Penny originally worked as a model. In more recent years, she has become a prominent feature on our screens, appearing on Strictly Come Dancing in 2007, when she competed alongside Ian Waite before they were voted out of the programme in week six.

Since then, her TV career has continued. She took up a role on the Loose Women panel in 2014 and has appeared alongside the show’s stars on ITV ever since. She has also been spotted competing in Celebrity Catchphrase and putting her cooking skills to the test on Celebrity MasterChef in 2021.

In a somewhat surprising move, in 2021 she became a special police constable and was even on duty during the Queen’s funeral, and King Charles’ coronation.