Status Quo rocker Rick Parfitt passed away just four days after pleading with his first wife for forgiveness after she wed him when he was penniless. The musician, who died in 2016 aged 68, left behind a modest estate after predictions that a £10million fortune would go to his family proved to be wrong.

Rick – who also featured in five episodes of ITV soap Coronation Street back in 2005, playing himself – may have achieved remarkable fame with his band over the years, but he began life battling financial hardship. According to his first wife Marietta Boeker, Rick was squandering too much on drugs and motors.

She told the Daily Mail in 2017: “Rick got to the stage where he’d take three grams of cocaine a day, with seven bottles of wine and a bottle of whisky to go with it. The money was going out of the window as fast as it came in. Most of it went on cars, drugs, big hotels and women.”

Despite their difficulties, Marietta was so smitten with Rick she surrendered her rights to a £2million inheritance from her well-off father in order to wed him. Her dad even offered to purchase her a luxury flat to prevent the marriage, but she declined, reports the Express.

She revealed: “Rick was extremely poor at this stage. I asked him if he could borrow a dinner jacket [for Christmas with her family]. He appeared on Christmas Eve in a white satin suit with white platforms and blonde curls.”

When Marietta abandoned her inheritance, she relocated to Rick’s mother’s two-bedroom council property in Woking – complete with 144 crystal glasses packed away in boxes.

However, as situations began to intensify and Rick started engaging in affairs with admirers, Marietta’s father provided them with £100,000 to relocate to a bungalow together, before accumulating sufficient funds for a nine-acre property in Surrey.

Marietta and Rick had two children together, but their daughter Heidi tragically died in the family swimming pool aged just two.

The strain resulted in a divorce, and Rick subsequently married Patty Beeden and later Lyndsay Whitburn.

By 2016, as Rick approached the end of his life, he had pleaded with Marietta for forgiveness during a telephone conversation.

She revealed: “We chatted for almost two hours about God and the world, including the songs both of us wanted to be played at our funerals.”

When Rick died from sepsis, his third wife Lyndsay feared she had been cut out of Rick’s will – worrying about the future of their twins.

His estate was valued at just £230,000 after debts and expenses were deducted, despite previously being estimated at £10million.

A will executed four days before his death revealed that the money would be split between Lyndsay and his children.