Why Kate Winslet is hellbent on keeping her VERY bohemian husband's naughty past secret 

Wealthy, extrovert and with ‘buckets of the Branson charm’, Ned Rocknroll, Sir Richard Branson’s nephew, is currently to be found playing house-husband to actress Kate Winslet in a beach-front pile in Sussex.

He does the school runs — there are three children, one of whom is his — wipes down the Aga and has taken charge of renovating their listed, £3 million-plus property.

Balding, bohemian and posh, he quit his part-time job with the nascent space tourism programme Virgin Galactic several years ago.

Kate with her third husband, Ned Rocknroll, who she describes as ‘the most enthusiastic person I have ever met in my life’

Kate adores her third husband, and sighs that he is ‘incredibly supportive’ and ‘the most enthusiastic person I have ever met in my life’. She adds: ‘He looks after all of us.’

Kate’s great pal, Emma Thompson, says he is a ‘cyclist, camping buddy, let’s-climb-Everest-next kind of person’, adding: ‘They’ll probably build a house out of goat poo or something!’

Should this come to pass, however, you can’t be sure we will get to see it, because it seems Ned is not so happy for the rest of the world to share in his madcap image.

Indeed, despite the ludicrous look-at-me name (chosen pre-Kate), Ned Rocknroll is the latest in a string of celebrities to use the law to try to gag the media by securing an injunction concerning a dubious moment in his past.

His lawyers have argued — as did the as-yet-unnamed married celebrity who is alleged to have indulged in a threesome — that his step-children and child might be bullied if the truth about the incident in question emerged.

This time, though, the ‘private matter’ seems laughably minor. All that is being expensively kept out of the public domain are some photographs, once posted on a Facebook page, which show him at a fancy dress party in 2010.

He is semi-naked and his representatives admit he is indulging in ‘silly schoolboy antics’.

The legal moves to keep the images out of the public domain were made in 2013. At the time, he and Miss Winslet said in a joint statement: ‘We have stopped The Sun from publishing semi-naked photos of Ned taken by a friend at a private 21st birthday party a few years ago.

‘The photos are innocent but embarrassing, and there is no reason to splash them across a newspaper.’

Now the alleged contents of the pictures have been revealed in a major U.S. publication, making a mockery of the law.

In 2009, Ned married Eliza Pearson (pictured), the daughter of Sussex landowner Viscount Cowdray

The publication, read by millions, has published what it says are detailed descriptions of the pictures and an account of the correspondence with the couple’s lawyers.

Suffice to say that the publication and those lawyers reach very different conclusions about the photographs.

Kate Winslet — who in virtually every interview stresses how ‘normal’ and ‘down to earth’ she is — has thus joined other celebrities who use Draconian measures in the British courts to suppress secrets, only for them to become widely known and reported around the world.

The most recent example came this month when it emerged that a married A-list actor had a £195 liaison with a prostitute, but used a gagging order to protect his reputation. This did not stop his name being published in America and Ireland.

So why on earth are Winslet and Mr Rocknroll making such an ill-advised fuss? After all, Ned’s uncle, Sir Richard Branson, is possibly the world’s most inveterate show-off.

He joyously invaded the couple’s privacy by posting on Twitter a picture of their honeymoon on his Caribbean island, Necker. And it’s not as if Kate is a stranger to publicity — far from it.

However, pictures of a middle-aged man larking around mostly naked are a world away from the stage-managed interviews Kate gives to selected publications to plug, for instance, her association with cosmetics giant Lancome.

And since meeting La Winslet, it seems that Ned has reined in that puppyish, anything-goes Branson abandon — at her say so. 

Indeed, it seems Kate is thoroughly his boss: in other words, the legal moves could be interpreted as a Hollywood star seeking to preserve her dignity.

Her insistence that daughter Mia, 15, should not be allowed her own Instagram account probably falls into this category, too.

Kate adores her third husband, and sighs that he is ‘incredibly supportive’ and ‘the most enthusiastic person I have ever met in my life’. She adds: ‘He looks after all of us'

As she said last year: ‘I do have impossibly high standards. If I’m going to do something, I want it to be done properly, goddammit.’

Pictures of her house-husband looking an idiot in fancy dress are not, evidently, in keeping with her soignee image.

And that’s not the only airbrushing in play. Ned consented in 2013 to their child, named Bear Blaze, being given the surname Winslet.

Kate, rather witheringly, said: ‘Of course we’re not going to call it Rocknroll. People might judge all they like, but I am a ****ing grown-up.’

Happily, Edward Lyulph Abel Smith, to give him his birth name, has the knack of soothing even the sensibilities of Kate, an A-lister who is full of forthright opinions.

Born in 1978, he is the son of Richard Branson’s sister Lindy and her first husband, Robert Abel Smith, a businessman who is deputy chairman of the Mesopotamia Petroleum Company.

The marriage broke up when Ned was only a toddler.

He is one of five boys who were raised in an arty, chaotic household in Parsons Green, South-West London, with Lindy, an artist, and their stepfather Robin Brockway.

Lindy had a potter’s studio in the back garden for many years, before Ned’s brother Otto took over the space to make music videos.

Uncle Richard helped out by buying the house next door for them, allowing them to knock the two terrace houses together.

Still, life remained endearingly shambolic. Lindy recalls feeding the children in a huge roll-top bath in order to minimise the mess made, and says boots and bats would rain down if anyone opened a cupboard.

It seems, her mission was to cover up for her husband’s embarrassing photograph. Her efforts have paid off thus far — but now they appear to be unravelling

Ned started working for Richard Branson when Virgin Galactic was in its infancy, and had a job in the marketing department. At this point, in 2008, he changed his name. ‘He thought Rocknroll was a great name, as he hopes to rock ’n’ roll into space,’ said a spokesman for the UK Deed Poll Service.

The following year he married Eliza Pearson, daughter of Sussex landowner Viscount Cowdray. 

His grandmother Eve — Sir Richard Branson’s redoubtable mother — had offered Ned her own engagement ring to nudge him into marriage. 

The ceremony was as unconventional as the ‘wacky’ Branson groom and his hippie bride.

A druid called J. J. Middleway led the open-air pagan ceremony, conducted near a meditation pyramid in the garden, under the shade of an avenue of giant Wellingtonia trees. He was 31, she was 21.

But within 20 months they had separated. Eliza returned to live with her parents and started to plan setting herself up in business running workshops about sustain-able farming methods; Ned stayed in London on his own.

Eliza said at the time: ‘We have decided to have some time out from each other. I felt I wasn’t ready to settle down yet. I suppose I got married too young — now I just want to hang out and do my own thing for a bit.’

A few months later, she admitted she wanted a reconciliation. ‘I am hoping this will turn out to be more of a break than a total separation, because the longer we are apart the more it’s making me realise how much I miss him.

‘I have never stopped loving him and we are soulmates — that doesn’t come along very often.’

However, a short time later Ned went to Necker on holiday, where he met Kate Winslet, who was holidaying with her children Mia (by the film director Jim Threapleton) and Joe (by director Sam Mendes).

It was a cataclysmic few days, with all the residents being evacuated after a lightning strike burnt down the main house. Kate was credited with saving Sir Richard’s 90-year-old mother from the fire.

Amid the high emotion of that time, Kate and Ned fell for each other, even though she was holidaying with her then boyfriend, male model Louis Dowler, and Ned was still married, though separated.

Dowler later complained: ‘I don’t think Kate behaved well and it is still very raw for me.’

By September, Kate was attending a memorial service for Branson’s father Ted, with Ned at her side. Soon after, she went to the launch of the Virgin Galactic spaceport in New Mexico with Ned (though he had actually left the company).

The couple were married in the Catskill mountains, in New York State, in December 2012, a mere 16 months after the holiday that threw them together, and none of their families attended the wedding.

Indeed, Press reports suggested that Kate’s father found out only three weeks later, which must have caused some upset.

But then in recent years, it seems Kate Winslet has become very good at knowing exactly what she wants, and getting it.

She told an interviewer: ‘I am a very up-front, hands-on individual. I don’t pretend things aren’t happening and I don’t sweep them under the carpet.’

As her second husband, Sam Mendes, once said: ‘Kate doesn’t over-analyse, she’s a doer.’

In this case, it seems, her mission was to cover up for her husband’s embarrassing photograph. Her efforts have paid off thus far — but now they appear to be unravelling.