They have been quietly dating for more than a month and a close friend of One Million Years B.C. icon Raquel, now 73, confirmed yesterday: “She finds Nigel fascinating and an absolute English gentleman.
“Even though she is almost ten years older than him, she stills looks great and Nigel is so smitten he seems to almost worship the ground she walks on. The chemistry between them is so strong, they are just going with it.”
Astonishingly, their relationship has landed 64-year-old American Idol executive producer Lythgoe, who is also a judge on the US show So You Think You Can Dance, in the middle of a Hollywood romance swap.
He dated Elvis Presley’s ex-wife Priscilla between 2006 and 2009 and she is now dating Raquel’s fourth ex-husband, restaurant mogul Richard Palmer. Raquel’s friend added: “She sees all this as serendipity.
“She believes she and Nigel, who have known each other for years, were meant to be together all along and she is already talking about the possibility of him becoming husband number five.”
Though separated for years as Lythgoe pursued his Hollywood dream after achieving fame as an acid-tongued judge on UK show Popstars, he and Bonnie, his wife of 26 years, did not finalise their divorce until 2010.
“He is now free to tie the knot a second time,” a source close to him at Fox TV, which airs American Idol, declared. “He says he has to pinch himself regularly to remind himself he really is dating one of the world’s most enduring sex symbols.”
Lythgoe and Raquel were first seen together in public at a pre-Emmy Awards party on September 20 at trendy Melrose Place, West Hollywood restaurant Fig & Olive and have since been spotted together several times.
At one recent romantic, candle-lit dinner at LA’s Soho House, a fellow diner observed: “They might have more than 130 years on the age clock between them, but they behaved like teenagers in love.
“They were holding hands across the table and gazing into each other’s eyes like youngsters throughout the meal. It was actually all rather touching to witness and when they left he offered her his arm in a lovely old-fashioned way.Lythgoe leapt into the big league of TV moguls in 2000 when he joined Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment empire to turn the Idol series into a worldwide franchise and now has an estimated net worth in excess of £130 million.
Mother-of-two Raquel, who has racked-up more than 60 film and TV movie credits since becoming an instant global sex symbol as a loincloth-wearing cavewoman in the 1966 hit One Million Years B.C., is reckoned to be worth around £40 million by America’s Forbes magazine.
Her friend told the Sunday Express: “She’s fully aware that age might not be on her or Nigel’s side. But I haven’t seen her as happy as she is with him for more years than I care to remember.”
Official spokesmen for both her and Lythgoe said they would not comment on their celebrity clients’ private lives.
