I didn’t know much about The Beatles, admits actress playing Ringo’s wife

 The actress who plays Ringo Starr’s first wife in a forthcoming biopic has admitted that she couldn’t name all four members of The Beatles. Mia McKenna-Bruce, 28, also said she was unfamiliar with most of the band’s songs until she was cast as Maureen Starkey.

Sam Mendes is directing four Beatles biopics, each focusing on a different member of the band, to be released in 2028.

McKenna-Bruce’s casting was announced while she was filming an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery with Martin Freeman. The actress revealed that Freeman teased her over her lack of Beatles knowledge. “We sang Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine at school, but it wasn’t my jam,” she told Tatler.

“On Seven Dials, Martin Freeman was asking me to name all the Beatles. I didn’t know. Then he’d ask me: ‘What band was Mick Jagger in?’ I was like, ‘I have no idea, Martin’, and he was like, ‘Aargh!’

“Yet now, I’m like: ‘Oh my God, the Beatles are underrated! This is good! It’s music I’d sit and listen to on the train.’”
The Beatles films will star Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.

Maureen was a teenage hairdresser and Beatles fan when she met Starr at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. They began dating in 1962 and hastily married in February 1965 after discovering that Maureen was pregnant. They went on to have three children including Zak Starkey, now a famous drummer in his own right. 

The marriage was strained by infidelity on both sides, including Maureen’s affair with George Harrison. She and Starr divorced in 1975 and she later married Isaac Tigrett, one of the founders of the Hard Rock Cafe. Starr married Barbara Bach, the Bond actress, in 1981.

When Maureen died from leukaemia in 1994, Starr was among the family members at her bedside.  

McKenna-Bruce said: “I haven’t met Ringo but apparently, to this day, when he talks about Maureen he gets this brightness behind his eyes. “Ringo went through so much – all of the Beatles did – and Maureen really grounded him, so it’s important to me to keep her as human and warm as possible.” She will appear in the biopics alongside Saoirse Ronan as Linda Eastman, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono and Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd.

Source: Anita Singh/telegraph.co.uk