Former Wife Of Ringo Starr Dies

Maureen Cox Starkey Tigrett, former wife of Beatle Ringo Starr, has died of complications arising from leukemia treatment, family friends and hospital officials said Saturday.

Tigrett, 47, of Los Angeles, died Friday at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, spokesman Jerry Vanderwood said. She had been admitted Oct. 20 for treatment of mylodysplastic syndrome, a pre-leukemic disease.

Starr and their three adult children, and husband Isaac Burton Tigrett and their 7-year-old daughter, Augusta, were with Tigrett when she died, Vanderwood said.

Part of her treatment involved a transplant of bone marrow from her eldest son, musician Zak Starkey, Vanderwood said.

She was released briefly before Christmas, and stayed in the Seattle area until her readmission Christmas Day, he said.

Tigrett was born Mary Cox in Liverpool, England, where the Beatles began in the early 1960s. Shortly after starting work as a hairdresser, she changed her name to Maureen. She was 15 when she met her first husband, Richard Starkey - better known as Ringo Starr - at Liverpool’s Cavern Club in 1962. They married in 1965.

Before their 1975 divorce, the couple had three children: Zak, now 29; Jason, 27; and daughter Leigh, 24, all living in London.

She later married Hard Rock Cafe creator and founder Tigrett, an entrepreneur now developing a series of House of Blues music clubs.