Christiaan Barnard - Personal Life

Personal Life

Barnard's first marriage was to Aletta Gertruida Louw, a nurse, whom he married in 1948 while practising medicine in Ceres. The couple had two children: Deirdre (born 1950) and Andre (1951–1984). International fame took a toll on his personal life, and in 1969, Barnard and his wife divorced. In 1970, he married heiress Barbara Zoellner when she was 19, and they had two children: Frederick (born 1972) and Christiaan Jr. (born 1974). He divorced Zoellner in 1982. Barnard married for a third time in 1988 to Karin Setzkorn, a young model. They also had two children: Armin (born 1990) and Lara (born 1997), but this last marriage also ended in divorce in 2000.

Barnard allegedly had affairs with a number of famous women, including Gina Lollobrigida and Françoise Hardy.

Read more about this topic:  Christiaan Barnard

Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:

    I was not at all apprehensive about ... disease ... [it] had no terrors for me. The thing I most feared in the world was hunger. That was something of which I had personal knowledge.
    Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 4 (1919)

    After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
    Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)