Profile - Mr Madonna

IT'S hardly hold-the-front-page news. Indeed, as bombshells go, "Madonna and Guy Ritchie set to split" is right up there with "Freddie Mercury is gay" and "Pope is Catholic".

Ever since Madonna first set her cap at the Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels director almost a decade ago, their union has been the focus of speculation – much of it forecasting its imminent demise.

For all their faux domesticity – their passion for country pursuits at their country retreat in Wiltshire, Ritchie's insistence on calling his wife "the missus", Madonna saying that he called the shots and she did the cooking – their relationship never really convinced. Despite their assertion that "opposites attract", they always seemed uncomfortable in each other's milieu. Whether it was Madonna falling asleep during a knees-up down their local or Ritchie walking 10 steps behind his wife as she walked out of Claridges with a sex toy, the gulf appeared vast.

Ritchie appeared less convinced than his wife about the wisdom of adopting baby David Banda from Malawi. And as for his involvement with Kabbalah, didn't that always smack of someone who was trying a little too hard?

In recent months, the couple seem to have been leading increasingly separate lives. And now, it seems, the inevitable has come to pass. Madonna wants a divorce and has hired Sir Paul McCartney's lawyer Fiona Shackleton. Ritchie, 10 years her junior, is said to have approached London law firm Forsters. With Madonna worth £300m, and no pre-nuptial in place, he could be entitled to a 50% share of the spoils. So who is the self-consciously English film director who sent Madonna "wobbly bonkers"? And what was it about their relationship that made them stay together (in showbiz terms) so long?

On the face of it, the attraction of Ritchie – a hard-drinking chauvinist and wannabe geezer – is difficult to fathom. Not only is he the kind of man who likes to spend his evenings supping pints with his mates, he is also resolutely un-PC.

One thing Ritchie does shares with his superstar wife, however, is a predilection for creating fantasy personas. While Madonna has taken on a variety of incarnations – from vamp to earth mother – Ritchie has stuck with the one: East End wide boy.

Although he was born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, to advertising executive John Ritchie and model, Amber Parkinson, and spent much of his childhood in 17th-century Loton Park in Shropshire, he cultivated a Mockney accent and the mannerisms of small-time gangsters so convincingly it seemed to take the media a while to realise it was all fake. Since then, his reluctance to talk about his life in anything but the vaguest terms has made it difficult to get a handle on his personality.

What is known is that Ritchie's childhood was volatile. His father and mother divorced when he was five and she married baronet Sir Michael Leighton – hence his years in the stately pile – divorcing again when he was 12.

Ritchie, 39, suffered from severe dyslexia, which hindered his learning. He was shipped from boarding school to boarding school, notching up 10 in all. When he left, he got a job with Island Records, smoked dope, hung around with criminals and got his famous scar courtesy of a Stanley knife – though columnist Julie Burchill suggested he got it "by falling off his pony and landing on his silver spoon".

But the violent streak seems real enough: Ritchie has been involved in a skirmish with Madonna's ex Andy Bird, and in 2000 he was arrested and briefly held after lashing out at one of her fans.

At 25, Ritchie turned to the film industry, quickly progressing from runner to director of music promos and commercials. But it was the idea of making contemporary Tarantino-esque gangster movies that inspired him. The idea for Lock, Stock – a tale of dodgy dealings among East End crooks – surfaced in his first short film Hard Case, but it wasn't until he took the longer screenplay to Matthew Vaughn, son of the actor Robert Vaughn, that things really gathered pace. Ritchie recognised the acting potential of ex-footballer Vinnie Jones, casting him as a violent debt collector and a phenomenon was born.

A slow burner, Lock, Stock went on to win a clutch of awards and make £11.7m at the UK box office. A TV spin-off followed. Ritchie's next film Snatch – about a diamond heist gone wrong – starred Brad Pitt as an incomprehensible gypsy boxer. It got a bigger budget but a slightly cooler reception, and almost everything he has touched since, from Swept Away, starring his wife as a socialite trapped on a desert island with a communist, to Revolver, has flopped. Ritchie's relationship with Madonna has followed a similar trajectory.

When they first got together during the making of Lock, Stock, they were inseparable, attending glitzy functions on each other's arms and giving joint interviews. Months after the birth of their son Rocco in 2000, they married in Skibo Castle. Ritchie adopted Madonna's daughter Lourdes and began focusing his film-making on his wife, directing her in a music video and a short film called Star. She, meanwhile, threw herself into her new life as an English wife as if she was a method actor rehearsing a new role.

But the cracks that were always there have widened over the years. In 2005, Madonna's TV documentary I'm Going To Tell You A Secret showed her refusing to speak to her husband for 24 hours and even cancelling a trip to Ireland with him. Later there were rumours about her relationship with music producer Stuart Price and speculation the couple had been attending counselling sessions. Ritchie put his foot down when his wife mooted the idea of adopting another baby. Then, finally, a few weeks ago, he announced he was turning his back on Kabbalah.

If more cynical commentators are right, that the couple's marriage only staggered on so long because it helped prop up their careers, then this seems an odd time to end it. After a couple of quiet years, they both have important projects on the go. Earlier this year, Madonna released her new album, Hard Candy, and her documentary on Malawi's orphans, I Am Because We Are, premiered at Cannes last month. Meanwhile, Ritchie's latest film, RocknRolla, is due for release in October. Madonna's presence on the red carpet would have guaranteed it extra publicity.

Then again, with relations between the two said to be so strained they text each other from separate bedrooms, any attempt at faking unity could easily backfire. Far from being cut short in its prime, the Ritchies' Mr and Mrs show should probably have been axed a long time ago.