‘Kate and Nikolai are on and off. She’s flirtatious… and whoever she is with has to accept it’: Inside Kate Moss’s ‘bohemian’ romance with Nikolai von Bismarck as they’re both spotted with other people – as sources say she never got over Johnny Depp

Her heart was shattered by Johnny Depp, Jamie Hince was the only man to persuade her to marry but couldn’t tame her and her affair with Pete Doherty hit the rocks because of his crack habit.

For the past eight years Kate Moss has been dating Count Nikolai von Bismarck – an aristocrat who shares her bohemian outlook and was once tipped to marry one of Prince Andrew’s children.

But pictures of the British supermodel holding hands with the reggae star grandson of Bob Marley in Turkey last weekend has set tongues wagging that all is not well with their eight-year relationship.

And last night at the Tate Modern in London a stony-faced Count Nikolai, 37, was impassive as he sat next to the British supermodel, 50 – who then turned her back on him to speak to others on the front row at the Gucci fashion show instead.

But despite apparent tension between them, and lingering rumours about their romance, those who know the couple insist her decision to hold hands with Skip Marley, 27, may not be the death knell for their relationship.

‘They are constantly on and off – but both are very bohemian about hook ups’, an insider with knowledge of her relationship with Nikolai told MailOnline today.

And someone close to Kate’s circle said: ‘She’s a passionate person – and she is still incredibly flirtatious with people. Whether it is Nikolai, or whoever she is with, they just have to accept it and get on with it or they’ll go mad’. 

Kate Moss famously had gone through 40 boyfriends by the time she was 40, but as she turned 50 in January, Nikolai has been by her side for most of the past decade.

Those close to her have brushed off what happened in Turkey last weekend.

It was on a Friday night in 2015 when a happy-looking Kate Moss was spotted escorting her then 28-year-old photo­grapher boyfriend to a cinema near her home in north London.

It had been troubling times for the world’s most iconic supermodel, who had just endured the painful and very public collapse of her marriage to Jamie Hince from The Kills. 

Jamie was caught in a tender clinch with buxom lingerie model Jessica Stam in America just a few weeks earlier.

But it then emerged that Nikolai and Kate had a secret week-long break on the ­romantic private island of Mustique where she is said to have removed her wedding ring. 

Her 2011 marriage to Jamie lasted for four years. 

Many, including her friends, were tempted to portray Jamie as the man who broke the heart of the nation’s favourite model – the first and only man who took her down the aisle. 

But others have said she never got over Johnny Depp, with whom she spent four happy and chaotic years until 1998.

‘The truth is she has never recovered from what happened with Johnny [Depp] and how their relationship ended the way it did. She was heartbroken. I’m not sure she ever fully trusted a partner again’, an insider said today.

Depp was the one who got away, and the defining love affair of her life, friends say. 

Some believe she is still in love with him and admitted herself that she ‘lost the plot’ when they broke up.

Johnny said hurtful things about being ‘broody’ and needing to meet the mother of his children shortly their chaotic Cannes Film Festival in May 1998, where Depp was promoting the film Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

It had been a global love affair, conducted at the Ritz hotel in Paris and the Chateau Marmont and The Viper Room in Los Angeles, with the couple flying around the world by private jet. 

When they met, he was 31, she was 20. He introduced the young Croydon model to art galleries, the joy of owning first-edition books and his bohemian heroes, whom she adopted as her own. 

During the course of their four-year romance, Johnny Depp presented Kate Moss with a diamond necklace — nestled between his buttocks, for a joke — and apparently poured her a bath of 36 bottles of champagne.

By 1998, Moss had hopes they would marry – but just at that point Depp dumped her.

A few weeks later, he met French actress Vanessa Paradis, and within three months she was expecting his baby.

Soon afterwards Kate went to rehab for the first time, and by her own admission she cried ‘for years’.

Their story began at the Cafe Tabac in New York’s East Village in February 1994, when Depp and Moss were introduced by a journalist acquaintance.

Moss later recalled: ‘I knew from that moment that we would be together . . . We just sat down and talked sheer nonsense, and from that moment didn’t want to be apart.’

Maureen Callahan, author of Champagne Supernovas, wrote of the encounter: ‘They had a drink, did some coke, and then went back to his hotel room, where they holed up the next day through a snowstorm.’

He would meet her in Paris, whisking her off to an £18,000-a-night suite at the Ritz, even though she had her own apartment in the city.

Legend has it they made love in every one of the Chateau Marmont’s 63 bedrooms.

Moss later reflected: ‘There’s no one that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said.

‘Like if I said, ‘What do I do?’, he’d tell me. And that’s what I missed when I left. I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust.’

But the love affair was always volatile. In September 1994, in the early days of the romance, Depp trashed the presidential suite at New York’s exclusive Mark Hotel  – later the scene of Meghan Markle‘s lavish baby shower.

Moss, who had been present, was unhurt and, after declining to leave, Depp was taken to a cell by the NYPD and charged with criminal mischief. However, the charges were later dropped.

Aside from being landed with a $9,000 bill to restore the hotel’s damaged furnishings, no harm seems to have been done.

One friend of Moss said previously of her relationship with Depp: ‘It was a romance which really shaped her. It’s not about money and bling and showing off — that’s just vulgar and stupid’.

There were ‘bust-ups’ during the romance, sparked mostly by Moss’s jealousy and Depp’s mood swings.

They split briefly in 1997, because of her partying and ‘the clinginess’. Moss was seen being comforted by a number of men, including actor Leonardo Di Caprio. But she and Depp reconciled — she missed him.

The rekindled romance lasted only six months. In January 1998, Depp reportedly ordered 36 bottles of champagne to fill a Victorian bathtub at the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill.

Their final outing as a couple was at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1998, where Depp was promoting the film Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. That was their final chapter. 

Not long after, Depp spoke regretfully about his single status in an interview. He told Hello! magazine: ‘I have been so stupid because we had so much going for our relationship. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for what happened — I was difficult to get on with’.

A few weeks later, in the summer of 1998, Depp bumped into French actress Vanessa Paradis in the lobby of a hotel in Paris. Once again, it was love at first sight. This time, though, everything was different: Paradis fell pregnant in August 1998. Their daughter, Lily Rose, arrived in May 1999.

Moss was devastated, and in December 1998 she checked into the Priory for five weeks. She later told The Face magazine: ‘I never wanted to go to rehab . . . I had lost the plot really.’

A period of happiness followed when she met Dazed & Confused editor Jefferson Hack.

Jefferson and Kate dated from 2001 to 2004 and welcomed their daughter Lila in 2002.

They remain close and Hack has been photographed smiling with Kate and current boyfriend Nikolai.

The author and journalist recently said that maintaining his relationship with the mother of child was one of the proudest things in his life, when he gave a rare interview about their modern family.

Speaking to The Sunday Times’ magazine, Jefferson said: ‘My relationship with Lila Grace and her mum is the thing I’m most proud of’.

They’ve managed to put their daughter first as single parents and as extremely influential characters, though despite their stratospheric fame, Jefferson said his daughter thinks the pair are ‘deeply uncool’. 

A chaotic relationship with Pete Doherty followed. They dated from 2005 to 2007.

When supermodel Kate Moss met hellraising Libertines and Babyshambles star Pete at her 31st birthday party in 2005, little did she know that the next two years of her life would descend into chaos.

They were Britain’s most talked-about celebrity couple. 

In his recent book, A Likely Lad, Doherty tells how he once accidentally set off a panic alarm in Moss’s bedroom at her home in St John’s Wood, North-West London, prompting 12 armed police officers to turn up at the door. 

He confessed that he pressed the button, which is thought to have been linked to the local police station, while looking down the side of the supermodel’s bed for a piece of crack cocaine he had lost.

Unsurprisingly, Doherty admits, Moss was not happy and the episode was one of the factors that led to the end of their tumultuous two-year affair in July 2007.

Doherty demanded Moss get a tattoo of his initials as a sign of her devotion.

‘I insisted she get on a bus with me,’ wrote Doherty. ‘She went everywhere in a limo usually. We got dressed up in disguise, put on wigs, and jumped on the bus around London. We used to have a bit of a laugh.

‘We got matching tattoos that first week, too. I think I insisted on that. I wanted her to prove her love, so I said, you’ve got to get a tattoo with my initials on, you’ve got to get branded – it was more of an insecurity thing on my part.’

But his partying eventually grew too wild for Kate.

‘Kate Moss didn’t go to crack dens. She never had an interest in all that, and, if I’m honest, that’s why we broke up’, he said in 2022.

In taking up with young Count Nikolai von Bismarck after her marriage to Jamie Hince failed, she gained entrance into a social circle that ­cannot be bought with any amount of fame or wealth – the British aristocracy.

Count Nikolai was one of the most ­eligible bachelors in England – and not just because he is the heir to a multi-million pound fortune and the great-great-grandson of Otto von ­Bismarck, the first chancellor of ­Germany.

He moves in royal circles thanks to his mother Debbie, who styled both ­Princess Eugenie and Princess ­Beatrice. He was even romantically linked to Beatrice, who he counts as a friend.

He is considered a fashionista thanks to his family connections with the late style icon Isabella Blow, as well as photographers Mario Testino and Annie Leibovitz.

Since leaving Harrow, Nikolai had been living on-and-off at his parents’ ­palatial Belgravia home. 

His fashion stylist mother Debbie –who is also a long-time friend of Kate’s.

Friend say Kate loves baby-faced Nikolai’s bohemian outlook and style.

He spent his gap year following the Inca trail in Peru and during a three-week camping trip in Ethiopia he drank cow’s blood for breakfast every day.

Though there may be a 13-year age gap between them, Kate is said to believe that Nikolai is ‘an old soul’.

But some of Kate’s Primrose Hill set, including Sadie Frost, are said to have told her in their early days that they felt less comfortable with her dating the son of one of her friends. 

Some even advised her that the relationship is bound to appear ‘a little incestuous’ to outsiders.

But the relationship has endured for eight years. And friends insist that the affair, one of her longest, may not be doomed yet.

Last summer he was seen heading to a hotel with French-American model Camille Rowe, however, he was central to Kate’s 50th birthday celebrations in January.

But last night’s fashion show appearance, their first together for four months, will mean rumours about their relationship won’t go away. 

He did not appear to be present during her recent trip to Turkey, during which she became so excited at a performance by Skip Marley that she ran on stage and had to be ushered away by guards.

Slip, the 27-year-old grandson of late reggae superstar Bob Marley, did not appear to be too perturbed by her passionate enthusiasm as he was later seen holding hands with Kate. 

‘Kate ran on stage as she loved it so much,’ a spectator told the Mail’s Richard Eden. ‘She was escorted off the stage by security. I don’t know whether there’s a “thing” [between the pair] but she’s a fan for sure. It was all very sweet and non-confrontational.’

Marley was performing at the launch of cultural festival Med Bodrum at the Turkish holiday resort’s Macakizi hotel, where the model is known to have stayed in the past.