Kirsty Bertarelli

Kirsty Bertarelli was born as Kirsty Roper June 30, 1971 in the market town of Stone in Staffordshire, England. Her father, along with his brothers, owned Churchill China, one of the world’s major manufacturers of ceramic products. She is the youngest child of her parents and has a sister named Julia. She grew up in a country house where she played tennis with her siblings and learned to ride horse. She also worked at her father’s factory during holidays, which helped her stay grounded.

A sensitive and emotional child, she wrote poetry as a child. She was admitted to the now-defunct independent girls boarding school, Howell’s School, in north Wales. She was an average student in school, but had to stop education after she suffered from bacterial meningitis which almost killed her.

She married Italian-born Swiss businessman and philanthropist Ernesto Bertarelli in 2000 after three years of dating. The couple has three children together: Chiara, Falco and Alceo. She splits her time between their estate in Gstaad and their house on the shores of Lake Geneva. Her husband gifted her the 314-foot, £100 million yacht Vava II on her 40th birthday.

Kirsty Bertarelli started focusing on her interest in writing songs after a near-death experience when she was in school. While entering the music industry was her primary goal, she also signed up with a modeling agency which entered her into the Miss UK pageant. She went on to win the title in 1988, and thus qualified for the Miss World pageant, in which she finished as the 2nd runner-up and won £1,000.

She continued to work as a model for advertisements and bought a flat in South Kensington through a trust fund. During this time, she lived with casino heir Damian Aspinall in Belgravia for two years. In the mid-1990s, she relocated to London and started writing songs professionally, signing a deal with Warner Records.

She first met her future husband Ernesto Bertarelli at a dinner party on his yacht off the coast of Sardinia in 1997. She wrote the song, ‘I Wouldn’t Want To Be’, commemorating her budding romance with Ernesto. The song was later reworked and recorded as ‘Black Coffee’ by the girl group All Saints for their second studio album, ‘Saints & Sinners’ in 2000. It was an instant hit, topping the UK charts and reaching Top 10 in seven other countries.

Kirsty Bertarelli, who always wanted to be a pop singer, decided to pursue her dream in the late 2000s. After she recorded some of her songs for the UK-Swiss charity Smiling Children Foundation, she was praised for her “golden voice” in the Swiss newspaper ‘Le Matin’, and was subsequently signed by Universal Music.

On December 9, 2009, she released her debut single, ‘Don’t Say’, as digital download. It was followed by her debut album, ‘Elusive’, which was released on January 15, 2010, and debuted at No.20 on the Swiss chart. Her next two singles, ‘Elusive’ and ‘More Than Anything’, were released in 2010. She went on to perform live at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and later opened for Simply Red in Edinburgh and Zürich.

Her 2011 single ‘Set Your Body Free’ included remixes from Loverush UK!, Jason van Wyk, Full Intention and Nova. After WWF chose a remix of her conservation song ‘Green’ as the anthem for their 50th year of conservation at their annual Panda Ball in 2011, she donated all proceedings from the single to support the Fund’s projects. She signed an exclusive music deal with Sony/ATV Music in January 2012 and collaborated with world-renowned trance DJ Armin van Buuren on her songs, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Free of War’. In February 2012, she released the acoustic album ‘Green’, which was followed by ‘Love Is’ in 2013 and ‘Indigo Shores’ in 2014.