Sir Richard Branson announced his wife’s death the way he’d lived their love story—with honesty, emotion, and complete transparency about what she meant to him. Joan Templeman, his partner for 50 years, his wife since 1989, had died at 80. He called her his best friend, his rock, his guiding light. An incredible mother and grandmother. The words weren’t corporate or careful—they were raw with grief, the kind that comes from losing someone who’d been woven into every part of your life for half a century.
Their love story began with pursuit and persistence. Joan wasn’t initially interested when Richard first approached her—a fact he’d recount fondly in interviews over the years, finding humor in her initial resistance. But he pursued her anyway, convinced she was worth the effort, worth the patience it would take for her to see what he already knew. He invited her on a trip to Necker Island, the Caribbean paradise that would eventually become their home, hoping the beauty and isolation might shift something between them.
It worked. Necker Island became the setting where their relationship solidified, where she finally saw him the way he’d been seeing her all along. They married in 1989 and built a life together that spanned business empires, three children, countless adventures, and the quiet domestic moments that actually define relationships—mornings over coffee, inside jokes, the comfort of someone who knows you completely.
One story Richard shared over the years captured everything about his devotion. He once stopped a plane from taking off—literally had it turned around on the tarmac—just so he could return to Joan for a moment he realized couldn’t wait. Not because of emergency or crisis, but simply because he needed to tell her he loved her, needed to be near her, needed to prioritize that connection over whatever business obligation had pulled him away. It was extravagant and impractical and completely sincere—the kind of gesture that looks ridiculous until you understand it’s actually what love looks like when you refuse to take someone for granted.
They had three children together: Holly, Sam, and Clare. Clare died shortly after birth, a tragedy that might have broken some couples but seemed to deepen their bond instead. Grief shared can either fracture relationships or cement them, and for Richard and Joan, losing their daughter created a tenderness between them that informed everything that came after. They understood together what it meant to lose what you love most, and they held each other tighter because of it.
Richard’s tribute reflects a lifetime of devotion and partnership. Joan wasn’t just the woman he married—she was the person who steadied him when his ambitions threatened to spin out of control, who kept him grounded when success could have made him insufferable, who chose private happiness over public spotlight even as he built one of the world’s most recognizable brands. She was his rock, and he never pretended otherwise.
Fifty years together. Half a century of mornings and arguments and reconciliations and ordinary days that add up to a lifetime. They watched their children grow, built homes, weathered business failures and successes, navigated the particular challenges of being married to someone the world knows but you actually live with. And through it all, Richard never stopped pursuing her the way he did at the beginning—stopping planes, choosing her, making sure she knew she was his priority.
Her cause of death wasn’t disclosed, and that’s appropriate. Some things remain private even when your life has been lived publicly. What matters isn’t how she died but how she lived—as the center of a family, the steady presence behind a man whose life was often chaotic, the love that lasted 50 years and would have lasted longer if time had allowed.
Richard’s grief is public now because his life has been public, but the loss is deeply personal. Fifty years of inside jokes and shared memory, of knowing someone so completely that their absence leaves a hole nothing else can fill. He’ll continue forward because that’s what people do—they survive, they carry on, they find meaning in the years they were given rather than dwelling only on the years they lost.
But he’ll carry her with him. In decisions made differently because of her influence. In the children and grandchildren who inherited pieces of her. In the memory of a love that started with pursuit and ended only because mortality demanded it, not because devotion ever wavered.