Amber Heard has revealed that she secretly welcomed her first child via surrogate earlier this year.
On Thursday (1 July), the 35-year-old actor announced the news in an Instagram post where she shared a photo of her tenderly cradling her daughter, named Oonagh Paige, on her chest.
The Aquaman star wrote: “I’m so excited to share this news with you. Four years ago, I decided I wanted to have a child. I wanted to do it on my own terms.”
“I now appreciate how radical it is for us as women to think about one of the most fundamental parts of our destinies in this way,” she wrote. “I hope we arrive at a point in which it’s normalized to not want a ring in order to have a crib.”
Adding: “A part of me wants to uphold that my private life is none of anyone’s business. I also get that the nature of my job compels me to take control of this.”
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She concluded by revealing that her daughter was born on 8 April 2021. “Her name is Oonagh Paige Heard. She’s the beginning of the rest of my life,” she disclosed.
The name Oonagh is of Greek, Scottish and Irish origin, and means “pure” or “holy”.
Heard has faced a turbulent couple of years, with her 2015 to 2017 marriage to Johnny Depp involving a number of legal actions.
Earlier this year, Depp lost a bid to overturn a High Court ruling which concluded he assaulted his ex-wife Heard and left her in “fear for her life”.
The Hollywood star took News Group Newspapers (NGN), which publishes The Sun, to court last year after an April 2018 column called Depp a “wife-beater”.
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Sign upFollowing a three-week trial, Justice Nicol dismissed his libel claim against the newspaper and said the article was “substantially true”.
The judge also ruled that Depp assaulted Heard on a dozen occasions and put her in “fear for her life” three times. He also rejected Depp’s contention that Heard was a “gold digger”.
Depp is embroiled in a separate libel battle in the US, having sued Heard personally over a 2018Washington Post opinion piece in which she claimed to be a victim of domestic abuse but did not mention the actor by name.
The actor’s $50m (£35m) US case against the Justice League actor has been delayed until April 2022.
