By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: Jemima Goldsmith, the screenwriter and film producer once married to former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan, has married for a second time, exchanging vows with the Irish-Australian financier Cameron O’Reilly in a private ceremony over the weekend.
The wedding, held on Sunday, brings to a close a courtship of just over a year and comes 22 years after Goldsmith’s divorce from Khan. It was first confirmed publicly not by the couple themselves but by Goldsmith’s sister-in-law, Jemima Jones, who is married to her brother Ben Goldsmith. Jones posted a photograph from the celebrations on Instagram, showing herself and her husband dressed for the occasion outside what appeared to be a château, captioning it: “Celebrating Jemima and Cameron’s wedding, with my favourite date, what a happy day!”
No official wedding photographs of the bride and groom have yet been released, and neither Goldsmith nor O’Reilly has commented publicly on the marriage.
Goldsmith, 52, is the daughter of the late billionaire Sir James Goldsmith and Lady Annabel Goldsmith. She has built a substantial career in film and television as a writer and producer, with credits including the Emmy-nominated The Clinton Affair and Impeachment: American Crime Story, as well as What’s Love Got to Do with It?, the 2022 romantic comedy she has described as her “love letter to Pakistan,” which went on to win four National Film Awards UK.
O’Reilly, 62, is the son of the late Sir Anthony O’Reilly, the Irish rugby international who went on to become a media tycoon and one of Ireland’s most prominent businessmen. An Oxford graduate, the younger O’Reilly spent a decade at Independent News & Media before founding his own private equity fund in 2003. He has four children from previous relationships.
The pair are understood to have met through their overlapping work in film and documentary production, with O’Reilly having served as an executive producer on a number of projects. They were seen together in the Royal Box at Wimbledon earlier this year, and reports at the time suggested they had been splitting their time between Goldsmith’s home in west London and O’Reilly’s base in Switzerland. Their engagement, after roughly a year together, was first reported in May.
The Goldsmith family, said to include Zac Goldsmith and the Mayfair club owner Robin Birley, is understood to have welcomed O’Reilly warmly as the couple begin their life together.
For Goldsmith, the marriage marks a new chapter after a relationship history that has, at times, played out under intense public scrutiny. She married Khan in 1995 at the age of 21, moving to Pakistan and living for several years in the Khan family compound in Zaman Park, Lahore, before the couple separated in 2004 after nine years of marriage. They have two sons, Sulaiman and Kasim, both now in their twenties. Since the divorce, Goldsmith has been linked to the actor Hugh Grant, with whom she had a relationship between 2004 and 2007, and was later publicly associated with the screenwriter Peter Morgan, creator of The Crown.
Despite the length of time since her divorce, Goldsmith has remained closely engaged with Khan’s political fortunes and, more recently, his imprisonment. Khan has been detained since his arrest in 2023 on corruption charges that he and his supporters maintain are politically motivated, and Goldsmith has campaigned publicly for his release, alongside her sons. Last month she urged the British government to intervene, describing the conditions of his detention as a “human-rights emergency” and voicing concern over his health, his isolation and restrictions on access to his family. She has also appeared at cricket fixtures between Pakistan and England, including a Test match at Lord’s with Sulaiman and Kasim, where the family used the hashtag #FreeImranKhan to draw attention to the campaign.
In an interview given while promoting What’s Love Got to Do with It?, Goldsmith reflected candidly on love, marriage and the years she spent immersed in Pakistani family life. She said her expectations of romance had been shaped, and ultimately distorted, by the films she grew up watching. “My life has been ruined by romantic comedies,” she said, describing the “illusion of love at first sight” as unrealistic, and characterising her own outlook as that of “an incurable romantic and an incurable cynic – all rolled into one.”
She said the years she spent living within Khan’s extended family in Pakistan had given her an unusually close view of arranged marriages, in sharp contrast to the dating culture she encountered on her return to Britain. “Ours was the only non-arranged marriage in the family,” she said, adding that she had often wondered “at what point would you accept an arranged marriage” after enough failed relationships. She was careful, however, to distinguish between forced and arranged unions, arguing that the latter operates on a logic not unlike being introduced by trusted friends. “Forced marriage is the other end of the spectrum and really has no place in the modern world,” she said, “whereas assisted marriage is where you are basically set up by the people who know you best and who hopefully love you the most… nowadays a random algorithm sets you up. So you are better off being set up by your parents.”
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