Hansen and Richards have been married since 1983. They have two daughters together: 26-year-old Theodora and 25-year-old Alexandra. Both daughters have worked as models and as nightclub DJs.
Richards' eldest children — 42-year-old Marlon and 39-year-old Angela (whose birth name was Dandelion) — are from his previous relationship with his former girlfriend Anita Pallenberg.
Richards and Hansen met at a nightclub in 1979 when she was at the height of her fame as a supermodel.
Richards describes his courtship of Hansen in his 2010 best-selling memoir, "Life." In the book, he tells the story of the first disastrous meeting that he had with Hansen’s family: Over Thanksgiving dinner, Richards got angry and smashed his guitar on the table.
Here are excerpts from Hansen’s 2001 Harper's Bazaar interview:
On the notorious Thanksgiving dinner:
“My nephew, who is now in his 40s and was a teenager at the time, just told me he remembers exactly what happened. Somebody at the table asked for Keith to play, which he did, and then the family went on talking. So he got a little angry. In hindsight, we look back and we think, ‘Oh, now I get it.’ But we were all high as a kite, and it just happened. It was another time.”
On how Richards courted her:
“Keith was constantly making me mix tapes, and he would do beautiful drawings on them. That was his method of communication.” He created collages with pictures of her from magazines, Polaroids, and notes written in his own blood. “It looks disgusting when it dries, but he loves the color red,” she deadpans. How would he get the blood? “Maybe he cut himself shaving?” she teases, then grimaces. “Or picked a scab?” She has kept these mementos. “I have everything n boxes. Thousands of those tapes. I saved everything.”
On doing drugs with Richards:
“All the myths are true ... I joined in on Keith’s frenzy, too, remember. It was the ‘70s, so we can’t say it was all Keith. But my mom told him that she was worried about her baby, and he told her not to worry because he’d take care of me. So, if I ever got really thin running around with him, he would take me off, put some weight on me. Keith promised my mom he would take care of me, and he did.”
On Richards being a domesticated dad:
“When the girls were young, Keith would drive them to cheerleading and to their Brownies meetings.”
On the couple’s health scares (Hansen successfully battled breast cancer in 2005 and balder cancer in 2007; Richards had brain surgery in 2006, due to a life-threatening head injury.)
“Here we are, in the middle of Fiji, just him and I, and he’s on his deathbed. How do we get from this small island to a bigger island and then a brain surgeon? We have to fly through a storm in some prop plane that his bouncing up and down with him locked into this bed and his head taped down, and the medics are these two kids that didn’t even have an aspirin to give him for the pain …,” she says trailing off on the story. Then she grins, “It’s just amazing. His time is not up. At all …
“The breast cancer was nothing compared to the bladder cancer,” she says. She found blood in her urine while at their country home in England after a tour and within a month was in chemotherapy, followed by surgery. “I told them, ‘Just get the fucker out of there. Get it out, immediately.’” She’s cancer-free now and, at the urging of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, has found a new calling in raising awareness for the disease.
Patti Hansen and Keith Richards at the 3rd annual Norman Mailer Center Gala in New York City, on November 8, 2001
