At 86, Ringo Starr has offered a deeply personal glimpse into the six people who shaped his life most profoundly, revealing a list that spans the drums of the Beatles, the collapse of his first marriage, and even companionship that survived the chaos of the band’s breakup. Those closest to him were not always the people the cameras captured beside him. Beyond his famous bandmates and his four-decade marriage to Barbara Bach, there was a Liverpool romance that ended painfully, a father who was largely absent, and friendships forged before Beatlemania turned the world upside down. Perhaps the most unexpected name on his list is his first wife, Moren Cox.
Long before he was Ringo Star, a young hairdresser in Liverpool knew him simply as Richard Starky. They met in the early 1960s around the Cavern Club, where Moren had developed a crush on the drummer. Ringo noticed her, too, and before long the two were dating while he was still building his career with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. When Ringo joined the Beatles in 1962, Moren found herself in a relationship with a man whose life was moving at extraordinary speed.
Yet she remained beside him through the transformation, knowing him before the screaming fans and international headlines. By 1965, Ringo proposed at London’s Ad Lib Club, and they married on February 11th, 1965 at Caxton Hall, in front of enormous publicity. The marriage produced three children, Zach, Jason, and Lee, with the children giving Ringo something outside the madness of the Beatles. However, the enormous pressures surrounding Ringo’s life, along with his infidelity, drinking, and other personal struggles, placed serious strain on the relationship.
The couple separated, and their divorce was finalized in 1975. Even after the marriage ended, Moren did not disappear from his life. In 1994, Moren was diagnosed with leukemia, and when she became seriously ill, Ringo was there, visiting her during her final days and remaining close to their children. She died in December 1994 at the age of 47.
Their relationship was complicated, imperfect, and ultimately heartbreaking, but she was his first great love and one of the few people who knew Richard Starky before the entire world knew Ringo Star. If Moren represented the life before fame, Barbara Bach represented everything that came after the chaos. The couple first met in 1980 while working on the film Caveman, where Barbara was an established actress best known for playing Bond girl Ana Amosova in The Spy Who Loved Me. She was not discovering Ringo as a Beatle for the first time; she already understood what it meant to live with fame, having experienced the pressure of being a recognizable actress herself.
The relationship moved quickly. They married on April 27th, 1981, just months after meeting, at London’s Marilleone Register office. Perhaps the most important thing Barbara brought into Ringo’s life was stability. Their marriage came during a period when Ringo was trying to move away from destructive habits.
Both eventually became sober, and they built a new routine around each other. For someone whose life had once been consumed by Beatlemania, that kind of private stability was enormously valuable. Ringo has credited Barbara with helping him become a better version of himself, describing their relationship in terms of companionship. They have now spent longer together than either of them spent in many earlier chapters of their lives.
She did not love only the Beatle; she loved the man who came after him, too. John Lennon was not simply Ringo’s bandmate. He was one of the people who helped make Ringo feel he belonged in the Beatles in the first place. When Ringo joined the group in 1962, John could have treated the new drummer as an outsider.
Instead, Ringo quickly became part of the inner circle, and their relationship grew into something much deeper than a professional partnership. John was famously quick-witted, sarcastic, and sometimes difficult, but with Ringo, there was a particular kind of affection built around humor. Ringo was not interested in competing with him, having his own dry sense of humor that could give John as good as he got. During the Beatles years, they experienced everything together—recording albums, touring the world, dealing with screaming crowds, and watching their private lives disappear.
When the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, their friendship continued through the studio years. Even after the break up, Ringo remained friendly with John. In 1973, John contributed the song I’m the Greatest to Ringo’s album Ringo, which also featured Paul and George in different ways. Then came December 1980, when John was murdered outside his home in New York.
Ringo later spoke about how devastating the loss was. He never seemed interested in turning their friendship into grand mythology, remembering John as a person, a funny man, a complicated man, a friend. George Harrison was more than a fellow Beatle. He was one of the people who knew Ringo through almost every version of his adult life.
Both men came from Liverpool’s music scene, and George was younger but had already developed a reputation as a serious guitarist. One reason they connected so well was their personalities. Neither needed to be the loudest person in the room, and George genuinely appreciated Ringo’s personality rather than simply his role as drummer. During the Beatles years, they became close enough that their relationship continued even outside the studio.
George was also a major supporter of Ringo’s solo career, contributing as a musician and songwriter, most notably on Ringo’s 1973 album. Their friendship had become independent of the Beatles. However, one complicated chapter could easily have destroyed that bond: during Ringo’s troubled marriage to Moren Cox, George became involved with Moren, deeply complicating the friendships surrounding all three of them. Yet somehow the friendship survived.
When George became seriously ill in November 2001, Ringo traveled to see him with his wife Barbara, wanting to be there in what would be one of the last times the two friends saw each other. George Harrison died on November 29th, 2001 at the age of 58. For Ringo, the loss was devastating, having already lost John Lennon two decades earlier. But Ringo’s memories of George have never been defined only by his death, remembering the humor, the music, and the friendship they shared.
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr spent some of the most extraordinary years of their lives side by side. They met when both were young musicians in Liverpool, long before either could have imagined their future fame. Once they became the Beatles, Paul and Ringo developed a particularly easy chemistry. Paul was intensely focused on the music while Ringo had a more relaxed personality and an instinct for making people laugh.
That contrast worked, with Paul understanding exactly what Ringo could contribute—his strength was serving the song rather than overwhelming it. By the late 1960s, tensions increasingly difficult to hide. When the Beatles broke up, the relationships between the four men became complicated, and Ringo and Paul were not immune to that tension. There were disagreements and periods when they were not particularly close.
Yet the friendship never completely disappeared. Paul contributed to Ringo’s solo records while Ringo appeared on Paul’s projects, including Ringo’s 1973 album Ringo, which featured contributions from all four former Beatles. After John was murdered in 1980 and George died in 2001, Paul and Ringo became the last surviving members of the group that had changed the world. That reality brought a different dimension to their relationship as the only two people alive who could fully understand standing inside the Beatles at the height of Beatle Mania.
In later years, their friendship became noticeably warmer and more public. They have appeared together, celebrated Beatles projects, and continued supporting one another’s music. Ringo has described Paul as his brother, a word that matters because their relationship survived enormous success, creative disagreements, personal conflict, and the breakup of a partnership that had once seemed unstoppable. Paul has been part of his life for more than 60 years.
The final person on Ringo’s list was not a Beatle or a bandmate, but rather his father, Richard Starky Senior, whose presence in his life was defined as much by absence as by affection. Richard Starky Senior married Elsie Glee, and together they had their only child, Richard Starky Jr. , who would later become Ringo Star. The family lived in the Dingle area of Liverpool, but when Ringo was still very young, his parents separated and his father largely disappeared from his everyday life.
For a child, that kind of absence can leave a complicated mark. Ringo grew up primarily with his mother, Elsie, who became the central figure in his childhood and remained by his side through serious childhood illnesses, including tuberculosis, which kept him in hospital for long periods. Despite the distance, Ringo never completely erased his father from his life. As Ringo became famous, Richard Senior remained connected to the family, and eventually the two men rebuilt a relationship that had been missing during much of Ringo’s childhood.
Richard Senior remained part of the workingclass Liverpool world that shaped Ringo’s personality and humor. The Beatles could make Ringo a global celebrity, but they could never change where he came from. As Ringo grew older, he seemed to understand that people could be complicated, having experienced failed relationships, personal struggles, enormous success, and periods when he himself had not always been the person he wanted to be. That perspective may have allowed him to look at his father with greater compassion.
Richard Starky Senior died in 1967 while Ringo was still at the height of Beatlemania, a strange point in life when the world watched the Beatles become more famous than anyone could have imagined, while privately, Ringo had lost his father. Ringo’s love for his father was not the uncomplicated love of a son who had been given everything. It was the love of someone who had grown old enough to understand that a person’s importance in your life is not always measured by how often they were physically there.
