Famous people & their unusual cars

Bentley, Cadillacs and Ferraris abound, as you would expect them to. Here, though, we’re approaching the subject from a different angle.

What follows is a run-down of cars you might be surprised to find are owned by these people, if you didn’t know already:

Pictures are representative models unless stated

As the founder of Lotus, Chapman (1928-1982) is usually associated with sports cars, but in 1966 he became the owner of a decidedly unsporty Renault 4. Apparently influenced by French motorsport journalist Gérard ‘Jabby’ Crombac (1929-2005), this was a ‘thank you’ to Chapman for using a Renault engine in the Europa.

The delivery arrangements were spectacularly complex. In response to a very late phone call from Chapman, Ian Scott-Watson (born 1930) flew with a friend, Colin Clark, to Paris and met Crombac, who drove them to Renault. Scott-Watson and Clark spent the next two days driving the 4 to Chapman’s holiday home in Ibiza. Chapman arrived a day later and flew them back to the UK via the German Grand Prix.

The first car owned by future double F1 World Champion Clark (1936-1968) was given to him by his father after Clark Snr decided to buy something else. Under new ownership, it was driven flat-out round Berwickshire and surrounding counties before meeting its end on the way either to or from a Hawick and District Young Farmers dance. Clark replaced it with a later version of the same car known as the Sunbeam MkIII.

Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z own many examples of the sort of car that might be expected to appeal to the fabulously wealthy. Perhaps the most unexpected is the 1959 Silver Cloud II convertible which the latter gave to the former as a 25th birthday present in 2006.

In the same year, the pair collaborated on the single Upgrade U. The video for this song featured another Rolls-Royce of the same era, but this one was a Silver Cloud III saloon.

The 46th President of the United States describes himself as “a car guy”. The first model Mr Biden ever owned was a 1951 example of the third-generation Studebaker Champion, one of the earliest newly designed cars to on sale after the Second World War, with far more modern styling than its immediate predecessors.

Multiple award-winning actor Clooney was the first owner of a Tango T600. Built by Commuter Cars, this curious device had two seats, but it was so extraordinarily narrow that they had to be mounted one in front of the other. Production was so slow that Clooney was in fact the only owner for some time. He has since been joined on this unusual list by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

DiCaprio is a long-time enthusiast of Toyota’s first and most famous hybrid, which went into production originally 25 years ago. “It’s a step in the right direction,” he once said. “We have the technology to make every car produced in America today just as clean, cheap and efficient.”

DiCaprio is by no means the only famous actor to have owned a Prius. Others include Jennifer Aniston, Larry David, Tom Hanks and Salma Hayek.

Eastwood – who was born in 1930 - has owned many cars in his long life, including sports models, muscle cars and – somewhat against form – a Fiat 500e. His collection has also included what he describes as a ‘Morris Mini Countryman’, though this is more likely to have been sold as either an Austin Countryman or a Morris Traveller. Either way, the little 1960s estate car was modified with full Cooper S running gear, which would have made it very much faster than it was when it left the factory.

While studying fine art at Newcastle University, Ferry (born 1945) spent most of his grant money on a Studebaker Champion coupe, largely because of how it looked. Six years younger than Joe Biden’s example, it was built in 1957, right at the end of the nameplate’s third generation.

The car is mentioned in Ferry’s lyrics for Roxy Music’s 1972 debut single, Virginia Plain: “Some place near the desert strand, where my Studebaker takes me, that’s where I’ll make my stand.” In practice, though, it rarely took him very far: “I think I spent more time pushing it than driving it because it was always conking out.”

Widely regarded as one of the finest basketball players in history, James began promoting Kia’s luxury saloon in 2014. This immediately led to claims that James was only saying nice things about the car because he was being paid to – for example, “There’s a thousand percent chance that there’s a zero percent chance that LeBron drives a Kia,” and “LeBron drives a Kia like I fly a spaceship.”

James, however, insisted that this was not true: “I was a Kia K900 driver and fan before we decided to become partners. For me, a partnership has to be authentic and real to who I am, and that’s what makes this one so special.”

The avant-garde composers of the Second Viennese School wrote music which was considered very difficult to listen to at the time, and to some extent still is. Despite this, Berg (1885-1935) scored a surprise hit with his first opera, Wozzeck, a grim tale of a solider who is abused by his captain and experimented on by his doctor, then murders his unfaithful girlfriend before drowning himself.

Wozzeck brought in enough money for Berg to buy a Model A convertible – an American-designed car, but one almost certainly assembled in Cologne, Germany – which appealed to the more frivolous side of his nature. The car has been beautifully restored, and is on display in the Vienna Technical Museum.

Three days before her death in October 1970, Joplin recorded the song Mercedes Benz, whose lyrics include the phrase, “my friends all drive Porsches”. In fact, Joplin owned a Porsche herself – a 356 convertible which had originally been light grey but was later given a psychedelic paint job. In 2015, the car (pictured) was sold at auction for $1.76 million, a price which has never been approached by any other 356.

The MGC was a derivative of the MGB fitted with a 2.9-litre straight-six engine. It was produced for only two years in the late 1960s, and was criticised in the press for its poor handling. Some people liked it, though, including the UK’s present King, then known as Prince Charles, who was given a GT (the coupe version) shortly after his 18th birthday, and has spoken highly of it since then.

The car has been in royal hands ever since, having been passed on to his son Prince William in 1997.

The fact that a famously brilliant Austrian conductor owned an Audi A8 should not astonish anyone. What’s surprising here is how Kleiber (1930-2004) acquired his. Towards the end of career and increasingly reclusive, he was nearly as famous for not conducting concerts as for conducting them; it was said that he would accept an engagement only if he was running out of food, and he had grave doubts about performing with the Bavarian State Orchestra at Audi’s headquarters in Ingolstadt in 1996.

He agreed to take part only in return for (as he wrote to a friend) “lotsa dough” and a 3.7-litre A8 quattro Tiptronic with many optional extras including pearl-finish paint, a heated steering wheel and beige leather upholstery. Audi agreed, so Kleiber had to do the concert.

The shortest-lived member of the Beatles, Lennon (1940-1980) did not actually own a Maxi, but it may be the most unlikely of the few cars he ever drove. In the summer of 1969, when one of the most famous people in the world, Lennon borrowed a nearly-new example from the Apple Records car pool to take his new wife Yoko Ono (born 1933), his son Julian and her daughter Kyoko (both born in 1963), on a trip to Durness in the extreme north-west of Scotland, where he had relatives and where he often holidayed as a child.

They never made it, as the notoriously bad driver Lennon put the car into a ditch some 70 miles short, injuring everyone on board except Julian, and it was never repaired – the wreck later was returned to the garden of Lennon’s Berkshire mansion, Tittenhurst Park. Lennon resorted to using a chauffeur for the rest of his life.

Scripps-Booth was one of the many American car companies which became part of General Motors for a brief period before being discontinued. As a young man wanting a car to impress women, Julius Henry ‘Groucho’ Marx (1890-1977) bought a no longer identifiable example largely because its door could be opened by the press of a button.

He didn’t know at the time that the Scripps-Booth engine had a habit of losing its pushrods, but he found out before he had completed the drive home. Having just spent $150 on the car, he had to stump up a further $50 to have it fixed.

Perhaps Denmark’s most famous composer, and the husband of one of its most celebrated sculptors, Nielsen (1865-1931) loved riding horses, and was devastated when his doctor told him to stop in 1924 due to the developing heart condition which would eventually kill him. A friend and admirer, industrialist Carl Michaelsen, gave him consolation in the form of an old Renault Type AX (with a saloon body unlike the one pictured here), which was so tall that Nielsen nicknamed it ‘the sentry box’.

Nielsen quickly developed a reputation as an enthusiastic – and alarmingly fast – driver, but not a sensitive one. While travelling through the island of Funen, he saw something bouncing along an adjacent field, and asked his daughter what it was. It turned out to be one of the Renault’s wheels, which had fallen off without him noticing.

Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848-1918) is perhaps best known today as the composer of the music to accompany William Blake’s poem ‘And did those feet in ancient time ‘ to make the hymn Jerusalem. He was well into middle age when cars first became available in the UK, but heartily embraced the new technology. So heartily, in fact, that he apparently became a combination of a Victorian gentleman and a reckless boy racer, to the great alarm of his passengers. He owned both a Gladiator and a Panhard which he seems to have driven flat-out everywhere.

This anecdote, told by his son-in-law, the singer Harry Plunket Greene (1865-1936), is typical, “We were nearly finished off coming up to town in the Gladiator yesterday. She ran clean out of control four times; at Cheltenham clean off the road on to the sidewalk between a couple of trees, and at Uxbridge she turned clean round on her axis and went backwards on to the sidewalk. It’s not pleasant, that sort of fun.”

Modern popes have cars bestowed upon them in surprisingly large numbers, but as they are on the way up the ranks they have to make their own arrangements. Before he became Benedict XVI, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger bought a Mk4 Golf – presumably for the benefit of his staff, since it is understood that he has never had a driving licence (though he can legally fly a helicopter).

He sold the car when he became Pope in 2005. Later the same year, its new owner sold it on eBay to an online casino for 198,939 euros, or around $250,000 (other figures are quoted, but the ones shown here come from reliable sources). The casino used it for publicity purposes, then sold it for $204,400, which was donated to charity.

In the days when she was simply Lady Diana Spencer, the future Princess of Wales was relentlessly photographed in or around her Austin Metro. A quarter of a century after her death, her most famous car has become a Series I Escort RS Turbo, believed to be the only one painted in black rather than white – due to orders from the police to make it less conspicuous. It also had a grille from a lesser Escort, for the same reason.

Diana’s cars tend to fetch high prices at auction, but this one exceeded all the others by a huge margin when it went for £722,500 in August 2022, due to its combination of provenance, rarity, exceptional condition and a very low mileage: just 24,961 at the time of sale. The previous auction record for an RS Turbo – around £63,500 – was obliterated.

The late Queen (1926-2022) drove, and was driven in, many cars, from state limousines to a 1960s Vauxhall estate which was so specifically equipped for her that it can’t be determined whether it was a Velox or a Cresta. Her least regal vehicles were original-model Land Rovers (later known as Defenders), which were well suited to being driven round the royal estates. As a trained mechanic, she would have been able to fix them if they went wrong, but she probably had people to do that for her.

Opportunities to mention saints and Ford Escorts in the same sentence come up very rarely, so we’re not going to pass this one up. Karol Wojtyła (1920-2005), who became Pope John Paul II in 1978 and was elevated to the sainthood in 2014, once owned what will probably remain the most valuable Escort Mk2 1.1 GL until the end of time.

Pictured, it was sold at auction for $102,000 in 1996, and again in 2005, the year of the pope’s death, for an almost unbelievable $690,000. At yet another auction held in 2018, its price dropped to $121,000, which is still an awful lot for an Escort 1100.

Part of the appeal of the original of the Mini in the 1960s – in addition to its practicality and its great success in motorsport – was due to the fact that many celebrities owned one.

The 1963 example driven by comedian and actor Sellers (1925-1980) was notable in that it was customised, at great cost, by Hooper. A similar, left-hand drive Mini of the same age was built by Radford for the 1964 Pink Panther movie, A Shot in the Dark, in which Sellers starred. Sellers later bought a Radford Mini (pictured) for his wife, actress Britt Ekland (born 1942).

In addition to the ones he has been paid to drive, former F1 World Champion Vettel has owned many cars, several of them very powerful.

While he has said that his favourite is the Ferrari F40, he has also spoken very highly of a model whose maximum output is probably less than 30bhp. In particular, he likes its rear-hinged doors, but its charming looks and lack of pretence may also be factors.

Although he mentioned cars in several of his novels and short stories, Wodehouse (1881-1975) was not a keen motorist. There is a famous anecdote of him buying a secondhand  Darracq (possibly but not definitely a Flying Fifteen, pictured) for £450 in November 1906, crashing it into a hedge outside the town of Emsworth within a week, abandoning it and never driving again.

Most of that is well attested, except the last part. Wodehouse is said to have done some driving in the US in the 1920s, and he certainly travelled from his home in Le Touquet in the family Lancia (model unknown) while attempting to escape the Nazis in 1940, but it’s possible that this was driven by his wife Ethel.

At around the time he moved from Newcastle to Queen’s Park Rangers in 2011, Joey Barton sold his Aston Martin and replaced it with the third-generation Prius hybrid. This was not so much a Hollywood-style nod to environmental issues as a realisation that his lifestyle was getting out of hand.

“People are struggling to put food on the table, and there I am with flash watches and cars,” he said at the time. “I told my PA to get rid of them.”