Maureen Starkey Tigrett
wife of Ringo Starr (1946–1994)

Maureen Starkey Tigrett (born Mary Cox; 4 August 1946 – 30 December 1994), also known as Mo Starkey, was a hairdresser from Liverpool, England, best known as the first wife of Ringo Starr, the Beatles' drummer. When she was a trainee hairdresser in Liverpool, she met him at the Cavern Club, where the Beatles were performing. Starr proposed marriage at the Ad Lib Club in London on 20 January 1965. They married at the Caxton Hall Register Office in London that same year but they divorced in 1975.
The Starkeys first lived at 34 Montagu Square, Marylebone, then bought Sunny Heights, in St George's Hill, Weybridge. In 1973, they bought Tittenhurst Park from John Lennon. They had three children together: sons Zak and Jason, and daughter Lee.
Early life
Mary Cox was born on 4 August 1946, in Liverpool, Lancashire, (now Merseyside), England. She was the only child of Florence Cox (née Barrett) and Joseph Cox, a ship's steward. As a teenager, she remembered turning her school uniform around to make it look like a frock, and paying a school friend ten cigarettes a day to teach her how to "smoke properly".
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2124432. VIAF identifies the subject as 44382756. The Library of Congress control number is n80077254. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1994, 1965 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maureen Starkey Tigrett” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.