Who is Koo Stark, you’re wondering? Well, that depends on who you ask … and even Stark herself may not be sure. After all, as an actor, model, photographer, tabloid sensation, cancer survivor, practicing Buddhist, and more, Stark has lived many, many lives. As a result, she’s not even sure who that all adds up to. “Are you who you are perceived to be? Are you? Well, I don’t think I am,” she told The Guardian in 2001. “And, of course, the more perceptions there are floating around about an individual, the less likely you are to be able to get to know them, because it’s very difficult to drop your preconceived ideas, whatever they may be.”
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It’s an intriguing philosophical question, but there are some things we do know about Koo Stark for sure. In the early 1980s, before he met Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, Prince Andrew was in a scandalous relationship with the American. Her good looks and commercial past proved to be a sticky situation for the royal family, and the relationship didn’t last all that long. Still, it had the effect of making Stark world-famous, and she’s remained in the spotlight over the years thanks to a string of controversies and public missteps. This is what you need to know about Koo Stark, Prince Andrew’s scandalous ex-girlfriend.
She was supposed to have been in Star Wars
Before she got involved with the royal family, Koo Stark was an actor, and her big break almost came in the 1977 classic “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope.” In fact, Stark filmed scenes for the George Lucas film that kickstarted a franchise, but all of her on-screen appearances wound up being cut. Still, her scenes have since been released as bonus material, showing that Stark originally played a young woman on Tatooine named Camie who doesn’t believe Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) when he insists there’s a space battle raging above their heads.
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At a convention in 1997 (via YouTube), Stark spoke to “Star Wars” fans about her memories of being on set. She noted that Lucas was a Quaker who didn’t drink alcohol, which caused some consternation with the cast and crew. “One of the things I remember that was extraordinary about filming was that all of the crew and most actors and actresses, at the end of the day’s filming, they really liked to have a drink to relieve the tension, especially on location.” They were filming out in the desert, she said, and Lucas decided to throw a party for the group to keep everyone happy. “There was everything you could possibly ask for,” she noted, remembering it as an incredible party at first. “Except, they forgot to order any alcohol. [It was] a party that nearly turned into a riot.”
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She dated Prince Andrew in the 1980s, and their relationship was plagued by scandal
In the early 1980s, Koo Stark struck up a short-lived relationship with Prince Andrew, the controversial son of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. At first, the beautiful young actor was an object of fascination in the media, but things took a turn when it was discovered that she had a bit of a scandalous past of her own. Before she was famous, Stark starred in a 1976 film called “Emily,” in which she’d appeared without a shirt on. That was too much for the British press to handle, and they whipped up a media frenzy around Stark that made her relationship suddenly front-page news.
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Thankfully, though, the royal family circled the wagons to ensure the public that they supported Prince Andrew’s girlfriend. Queen Elizabeth, it seems, invited them to tea in full view of a window. “We were visible to the paparazzi and Her Majesty made a point of snapping open the News of the World (front-page headline: ‘QUEEN BANS KOO’). Her actions spoke volumes as she poured tea,” Stark later told Tatler (via The Daily Mail). “Her only verbal comment was: ‘Oh, I do wish they would call you Kathleen and Andrew.'”
Princess Diana, no stranger to unwanted media attention herself, also supported Stark during that difficult time. “Diana was very concerned, kind and supportive. She was under stress, too,” Stark said, “even though she was safely behind palace gates.”
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She was once mentored by Graham Greene
When Koo Stark was younger, she struck up a mentorship with Graham Greene, the celebrated English novelist behind classics like “Brighton Rock.” She was in a television show based on his work at one point, and as she became incredibly famous thanks to her affiliation with the royal family, she visited with her old teacher.
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” … he asked: ‘What is this I am reading about you in the press? This is not the Koo that I know,'” she later recalled to I-M Magazine. “He was a tower of strength and was very concerned.” The author had a suggestion for a coping strategy that Stark might use to protect herself in the face of unimaginable attention from the world. “He thought I should start a journal and brought me the most beautiful Smythson journal, a box of pencils, a dictaphone and a torch. He encouraged me to write down my everyday feelings and thoughts. He said one day I should turn these notes into a book or an autobiography,” she said.
Though Stark has indeed kept a diary ever since, she told the outlet that she wasn’t convinced by the idea that she should someday share her recollections with the world. “My thoughts and my journals are very private to me,” she reflected. “I wouldn’t just publish them.”
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She was stalked by the paparazzi while she dated Prince Andrew
At the height of her relationship with Prince Andrew, Koo Stark was stalked and harassed by the paparazzi, making that a very difficult time in her life. They would wait outside her home, forcing her to change addresses multiple times, and they would follow her as she tried to go about her day. “It was terrifying,” she told I-M Magazine. “Each day, I did everything I could to try and conceal my face, maintain my silence and preserve my privacy, but the more I resisted the higher the price became.”
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As a result, some photographers went to extreme lengths in order to have something about Stark to publish. “They even raided my doctor’s and lawyer’s premises to steal personal documents about me,” she revealed. “I had nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. It was chequebook journalism at its worst.”
Because of the harassment she faced, Stark thinks of that period of her life as having gone to war. Looking back on the media frenzy in her interview with The Guardian, she reflected, “I can tell you honestly, to be subjected to that is something I would imagine is like going to war. And you could feel it, you could feel the aggression, you could see the grubbiness, the scariness, all the black leather and the chewed-up nails.” To survive it all, Stark needed to come up with a form of self-defense.
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Koo Stark is a photographer who photographed the paparazzi
Because Koo Stark constantly found herself faced by roving packs of men shoving cameras in her face, she decided to do the same thing back to them. “I just picked my old Polaroid camera and photographed them back,” Stark told I-M Magazine. “It was a practical way to hide my face and it developed into an exploration, a form of homeopathic therapy and healing. By nature I am a very private, gentle person but these attacks were unbearable.”
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Photographing the photographers made Stark feel like she finally had some agency in what was happening to her. She told The Guardian, “It gave me a feeling of being somehow empowered, just as I had felt, I suppose, insecure and frightened when I was on the other side of the camera.” Stark, a budding photographer herself, soon realized that the photos she took actually had some artistic merit. “It was interesting for me to see the photographs, to see the faces,” she recalled. “I could actually see more than with my naked eye … “
Stark’s pictures caught the eye of photographer Norman Parkinson, who co-signed her early career. Soon enough, she had an exhibition, and a book soon followed. Purely by accident, she’d found her calling.
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Koo Stark is a pioneer who sued the British media for libel … and won
As the 1980s drew to a close, having become severely fed up with the amount of attention she was receiving in the British press, Koo Stark took matters to the legal system. “So, in 1987, completely out of character, I went to court to protect myself and others’ right to privacy,” she told I-M Magazine. She appears to have been referring to a 1988 lawsuit about a Sunday People article that claimed she and Prince Andrew restarted their relationship, even after Stark had already married someone else. The lawsuit was decided in her favor, and it had the effect of slowly but surely changing the way British courts treated libel laws. “It took many years and much convincing for the law on privacy to be created,” she reflected to I-M. “In 2015, the Levenson enquiry eventually started to enforce privacy laws.”
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She kept going, too. In 2007, she won a lawsuit against Zoo Magazine, which, thanks to the topless role in the film “Emily,” had called her “a porn star” in writing. In a statement released after her legal victory, Stark wrote, “I am relieved that my name has been cleared of this false, highly damaging and serious allegation which has been proved to be completely untrue. I am delighted that the record has finally been set straight and my name cleared of an allegation that my family and I have found deeply distressing and hurtful.”
Koo Stark is a practicing Buddhist
When she was still in a relationship with Prince Andrew, Koo Stark convinced the royal son to try yoga. The spiritual practice was still relatively uncommon in the early 1980s, but that didn’t stop them. “We did make an odd couple, especially in the 1980s when it was considered antisocial to abstain from alcohol and unusual, if not suspect, to practise yoga, as I have always done,” Stark told The Daily Mail. “Andrew adopted the practices he found useful for his health and I never minded being considered eccentric for standing on my head!”
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Her interest in yoga eventually led her to a friendship with the Dalai Lama, according to her interview with The Guardian. When they met, Stark had tripped and fallen in the street, knocking out several teeth and leaving her with a gash on her forehead. “It didn’t bother me that much, because it was actually quite symmetrical in the middle of my forehead and I only saw it when I looked in the mirror,” she reflected. She cut herself a heart-shaped band-aid to put over the wound.
When she traveled to Sikkim to meet the Dalai Lama, he prayed for her. ” … I went back and splashed some water on my face about five in the morning and this scab fell off,” she said. “And I realized then that I was horrified that I’d lost my scab; I was terrified that I’d been healed.” She’s now a practicing Buddhist.
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She’s a breast cancer survivor
In the early 2000s, Koo Stark received some terrible news: She had breast cancer. Initially, after a misdiagnosis, Stark underwent a single mastectomy; then, when she was actually diagnosed with cancer, she had the full procedure shortly thereafter. “If you don’t have any breast tissue, your likelihood of developing breast cancer is 0.02%. And from my personal point of view, to have no bosom on one side and a deformed bosom on the other wasn’t appealing. It’s much better to have no bosoms at all,” she wrote in an essay for The Standard.
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Interestingly, Stark believes that her highly public life led in some way to the development of the disease. She wrote, “I believe that a major causative factor of it was a prolonged state of stress in my personal life, which I had no ability to alter. That crippling feeling that life has got the better of you … combined with other things that put a stress on the body … They all combined to leave me weakened.”
Reflecting on a decade since her diagnosis, Stark wrote that she wanted first and foremost to help spread awareness of breast cancer, giving advice to other women. “The most important thing when you’re being treated for and recovering from cancer is to have a positive mental attitude,” she said. Interestingly, Prince Andrew’s other ex, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, is also a breast cancer survivor.
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Koo Stark’s legal battles with her daughter’s father left her with a healthy bill
Koo Stark made major waves in the British press when she began suing various outlets for libel, often successfully. Later in life, however, Stark became entangled in a court battle of a different sort, as she got caught up in extensive litigation related to child support.
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She sued Warren Walker, the father of her daughter, over claims that he had once promised to support her and their daughter with a yearly salary of £50,000 plus expenses. The payments never materialized, and she took him to court in an effort to get the money she was allegedly owed. The Times reported that Walker called her a “gold digger” in his testimony, and ultimately the case was not decided in her favor. The judge ruled, “It would not be an exaggeration to say that the parties disagreed on almost everything, save for the fact that they each clearly love [their daughter].” Stark didn’t just miss out on back payments. Instead, she was also ordered to pay her former partner’s legal fees as well as her own, a legal bill that may have reached as high as £400,000.
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Koo Stark was accused of stealing a painting
The legal battle between Koo Stark and her ex-partner Warren Walker wasn’t limited to the money she insisted he promised to pay her for the rest of her life. The two also faced off in a legal situation that arose from an expensive painting, which Walker claimed Stark had stolen. The artwork was titled “A Moonlit Coastal Landscape With a Fisherman Drying Nets in the Foreground and Various Pinks Setting Sail,” and it was reportedly worth as much as £40,000
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The Guardian reported that the judge in the case scolded Stark’s lawyers over the fact that she took the painting from Walker’s apartment. “If your client had acted through the civil courts it would have been dealt with there, and if she had not gone to the property and taken away the painting, this would never have happened,” the judge insisted, pointing to the back-and-forth family court situation that Stark and Walker had argued over for years.
Instead of being drawn into a lengthy trial where she stood accused of a serious crime, Stark simply gave the painting back and the charges were dropped. Speaking to the court, she insisted that the whole thing was a malicious attempt by her ex to drag her down. “Today I have been cleared of a charge that should never have been brought against me,” she said. “I leave court with my liberty and my good name, but it should never have come to this.”
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Koo Stark defended Prince Andrew over his Jeffrey Epstein connection
In the 2010s, decades after Koo Stark dated Prince Andrew, the royal hit the headlines thanks to his association with disgraced criminal sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. After an accuser named Virginia Roberts went public with a story about having been abused by the prince when she was underage, Stark wrote a long op-ed in The Daily Mail defending Andrew’s honor. “The stain on his reputation is spilling across his life like blood from a new wound,” she wrote. “I know too much about the media and the law courts to allow the disgrace of an innocent man.”
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She went on to describe their relationship in great detail, insisting, “He is a war hero who, alongside the other brave men of the Falklands Task Force, risked his life for his country.” This is, of course, immaterial to the prince’s alleged guilt. “He could get anything broken to work again, took cameras apart and put them back together just for fun, he was a much better student than me … This is not the person portrayed by Virginia Roberts.” This, too, is of course irrelevant, as is her claim that, “Then, as now, he was very attractive to women.”
At this point, Prince Andrew has been all but excommunicated from the royal family, evicted from Buckingham Palace and relieved of his royal duties. It sure sounds like the royal family believes his behavior was unacceptable, even if Koo Stark does not.
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