New baby ‘best birthday gift’ for Lloyd Webber

Musician Julian Lloyd Webber is to become a father for the second time at the age of 60, he has announced.

His fourth wife, fellow cellist Jiaxin Cheng, 35, is due to give birth in June. The star, who turns 60 in April, said: “We are both so happy – it will be the best birthday present in the world!”

The baby – Mr Lloyd Webber already has an 18-year-old son – is due to arrive just weeks after the couple perform at his 60th birthday concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

The cellist, brother of theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber, married his fourth wife in London’s Chelsea in July 2009.

They met a few years earlier while they were performing in New Zealand.

The cellist’s first wife, whom he married in 1974, was his teenage sweetheart, Celia Ballantyne, a journalist, but the couple divorced 15 years later.

His second wife was Zohra Ghazi, an exiled member of the Afghan royal family, and the couple had a son, David. His third marriage was to French-Algerian Kheira Bourahla.

Mr Lloyd Webber has collaborated with musicians from Yehudi Menuhin to Sir Elton John and was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 1994.

Hosted by broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, his gala birthday concert also featured his older brother, Lord Lloyd-Webber, jazz singer Dame Cleo Laine, violinist Tasmin Little and soprano Danielle de Niese.