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Julian Lennon posted a picture of himself looking at his reflection to celebrate his birthday today. He tagged it with “If this is what is turning 60, looks like, bring it on.” The musician is now twenty years older than his father when he died tragically young on December 8, 1980, but echoes of the Beatles icon can still be seen reflected in his son’s face. Julian was still a teenager when John Lennon was killed but has vivid memories of their final conversations and how the wounds between them were finally starting to be healed.
Julian was born within a year of John marrying his first wife Cynthia in 1962. The Beatles were already starting to become a global sensation and John was rarely at home, showing increasingly little interest in his wife or his son.
The marriage had effectively been over well before then. The same year, John married Yoko Ono and soon moved permanently to New York. Their son Sean was born in 1975. He, too, was only five when he lost his father but in an even more devastating way.
Julian has spoken angrily in the past about how he was neglected by his father throughout his youth but recently he opened up about their improved relationship in John’s final days.
With John based on the other side of the Atlantic, Julian rarely saw his father and they had only started to talk more on the phone in the final year. The Beatle was a far more invested and supportive father to his second son and had said some particularly cruel things over the years about Cynthia and Julian.
Indeed, when he was killed in 1980, he left virtually nothing to either of them in his will, which had last been amended in 1970 to give Yoko Ono full control over his estate, valued at approximately $200million at the time of his death ($730million today).
John had only made provision for a $100,000 trust to be split between Julian and Sean. Julian sued the estate and finally settled in 1996 for a reputed $20million.
Nevertheless, it appears that Julian’s relationship with his father might have become closer, if they had been grabtred more time.
He said: “Dad and I had been getting on and speaking a lot more on the phone, you know, when I was sort of 15, 16 and 17…
“I just remember that as being the last kind of moments (I spent with him), listening to him being extremely happy in a happy place, and doing what he loved, and the music that he played me at that particular point, Starting Over, and some of the other album tracks.
“I was very happy for him and looking forward to seeing him again. Anyway, in another dimension…”
Like his brother, Julian has followed in his father’s footsteps making music. He has released a total of seven albums. Last year, he released a reimagined acoustic version of John’s iconic hit Imagine, in support of the people of Ukraine and protesting the Russian invasion.
Julian is also a photographer and documentary filmmaker, with much of his work focussed on conservation and ecological issues.
Residing in Monaco, he legally changed his name in 2020. Despite being always known as Julian, he was actually christened John Charles Julian Lennon at birth and finally had it amended to Julian Charles John Lennon.
