Tears for Fears star Roland Orzabal is opening up about the painful final years of his marriage, revealing that he fell in love with another woman before his first wife, Caroline, died after a long battle with an alcohol-related illness.
The “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” singer, who has written a new memoir, “Welcome to Your Life,” admitted he reached his breaking point after spending years watching his wife’s condition deteriorate. Orzabal described that while walking away may have seemed cruel, he eventually saw “a clear way forward.”
“Why was it important to be so candid? Well, because it’s the truth,” the 64-year-old told Fox News Digital. “I didn’t want to write something false. And also, I always felt that somewhere out there is someone who’s going through what you went through.”
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“I’d spent years and years with Caroline in this state,” Orzabal reflected. “It wasn’t just a year or six months. And yes, I had enough. I was shown a clear way forward.”
In October 2016, Orzabal met writer and photographer Emily Rath while Tears for Fears were in Colorado to perform at Red Rocks. He wrote that his immediate reaction when he noticed her was, “That’s my wife.”
“I’ve been around the world many times and had seen and met many attractive women, but I’d never heard those words before,” he wrote. “They didn’t make sense, either, because I was already married, and this woman looked nothing like Caroline.”
Rath was 30 when she met the then-55-year-old Orzabal. “Ouch,” he wrote. “If only I was half my age and she was older.”
After exchanging numbers, the pair developed what Orzabal initially described as a “friendship between two creatives.” Looking back, however, he acknowledged, “The truth is, I was falling in love with Emily before Caroline had died.”
By then, Orzabal had spent decades with Caroline, whom he had known since they were teenagers.
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Orzabal was around 14 years old when he first met Caroline Johnston. They married in Bath, England, in 1982, when the singer had just turned 21 and Caroline was 20. They had two sons.
Before Caroline’s physical and mental health deteriorated, the marriage had already endured significant strain. In the book, Orzabal describes a passionate but volatile relationship marked by frequent arguments. As his career took off, he spent long periods away and admits becoming increasingly “selfish,” “hedonistic” and absorbed in his rock star persona.
By the mid-1990s, the marriage was in serious trouble. The couple discussed separation and sought marriage counseling. Orzabal says he was determined to keep his family together while acknowledging “the pain that I put Caroline through.” Despite the turmoil, they stayed together.
Things changed in the late 2000s, when the couple settled into what Orzabal describes as a predictable, day-to-day life where heavy nightly drinking became routine. Around 2011, friends began noticing a change in Caroline’s behavior.
“It was a slow process,” Orzabal recalled to Fox News Digital. “She would say it’s menopause. ‘It’s the menopause. I’m not eating because of the menopause. I’m weird because of the menopause. I’m depressed because of the menopause.’ And she was always very emphatic, hard to argue with.”
“I went along with this for many, many years until it was obvious that menopause was over, but the symptoms continued and got worse,” he said. “It got worse and worse. We went to see several doctors, and they all said, ‘It’s alcohol.’ But even then I was in denial because I was a wine drinker. I thought, ‘It isn’t doing me any harm, so why is it doing harm to her?'”
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“To be honest with you, it wasn’t until the autopsy that I realized the truth,” Orzabal admitted. “Terrible.”
According to Orzabal, Caroline eventually struggled to eat solid food even as she continued drinking. She spent increasing amounts of time on the sofa, became anxious, stopped regularly cooking for their sons and alienated friends. Orzabal writes that her condition escalated to “seizures and hospitalizations,” “bizarre ideation” and loss of normal bodily control. He described watching helplessly as she “slowly melted away.”
Orzabal writes that Caroline’s drinking became increasingly secretive, and he later discovered that she had been hiding bottles of vodka. He recalled seeing her jaundiced with “deathly red marks” on her face.
“How much of a carer are you? Is that your natural bent?” Orzabal told Fox News Digital. “I would say with me, it probably wasn’t, but I did it anyway. And I think what it did was it would make me very angry inside, which wasn’t good. I had people talk to me about just leaving, which I would never have done. But I think in hindsight, it’s stupid to say now, but maybe I should have done something about it earlier or left. Sounds harsh.”
“I think the problem was that, one minute, she’d be fine,” said Orzabal. “We would have a decent conversation. And then the next minute. She was doolally — not making sense, demented.”
Orzabal wrote that as his feelings for Rath developed, he found himself confronting a choice about his future.
“I was at a crossroads, a tipping point, if you like,” wrote Orzabal. “A tipping point that would redefine my life. With all the things that were going on with Caroline, with all the visits to psychiatrists, to neurologists, to hepatologists, I was falling in love with a young, healthy woman who I believed loved me too and was the opposite of what I had left at home.
“… I had a talk with myself, out loud, pacing the room like some crazy man. I knew what was going to happen to Caroline: She would once again be committed and the whole process, the whole nightmare, would start again. And where would it end? I could choose the scenario, the illness, the misery and the frustration, or I could choose an alternative and leave her madness behind. … I could choose life, or I could choose death. God strike me down, cancel me, whatever, but I chose life.”
Orzabal told Fox News Digital that imagining a life beyond his wife’s illness left him with an agonizing sense of guilt.
“If you choose life at this moment, you were cruel,” he said. “But I think it was the final straw because Caroline had already spent three months in a psych ward. I’d been there virtually every day going to visit her. And then, all of a sudden, that night I saw an alternative life for myself, which is hard to do — hard to take. But I did.”
In 2017, Orzabal’s first wife of 35 years died. She was 54.
“I felt belief and disbelief,” he said. “I couldn’t take it in because you have to go into action. I had to speak to my sons, my family. You’re clearing up the mess that death leaves.”
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In 2019, Orzabal said he entered InnerBalance, a rehabilitation center in Colorado, for treatment of his Ambien addiction. He said he began to forgive himself there.
“There’s this madness that comes with grief,” he explained. “There’s the negotiation. ‘What if I did this?’ ‘What if I did that?’ And then, what happens when you no longer have that person to negotiate with? You no longer have that person to get angry. That’s all gone, and you are only left with the feeling.”
“I left out a lot of details, especially when it came to Caroline,” he continued. “It was a lot worse, but I wanted to be respectful of those who’ve passed on. I wanted to respect her name. She’s my sons’ mother. So no, I couldn’t put the gruesome details at all. Even though it sounds bad, it’s much worse.”
Orzabal and Rath married in 2020. They had a daughter, Eula, in 2025.
“Emily has been an amazing support system for me,” said Orzabal. “It depends on your belief system – I think that if you believe in the soul, then [Caroline] would completely understand. When I think about the person she was … she would understand.”
