Actress Amber Heard, whose court showdown with ex-husband Johnny Depp made lurid headlines around the world, has announced the arrival of twins, sharing a precious image of the tiny feet of infants Ocean and Agnes.

The boy and girl are thought to have been born via a surrogate – like their sister Oonagh, four – and Heard says that she is ‘elated beyond words to celebrate the completion of a family I’ve strived to build for years’.

Her path to their birth will not have been simple: she has been living since 2023 in Madrid, Spain, a country where surrogacy is not legal and where ‘renunciation contracts’ signed by biological mothers, to give up babies they have birthed, are not legally valid.

Indeed, it’s thought that Heard, who remains a US citizen, arranged for the surrogacy to take place in America. She wrote on Instagram: ‘Becoming a mother by myself and on my own terms despite my own fertility challenges has been the most humbling experience of my life.’

Not to say one of the most dramatic – it appears the babies were born around a month prematurely, and certainly the piercingly tiny legs and feet in her shared picture would back up that theory.

As for the paternity of the infants, friends confirm that Amber is single, and has been since late 2021 and the break-up of her romance with Bianca ʙuттi. (Camerawoman ʙuттi has recently worked on the films Challengers and Queer.) Heard hasn’t shared the name of the twins’ father, if indeed she knows it – she could well have used an anonymous sperm donor.

Amber Heard with Elon Musk, whom she dated for around 18 months

Heard posted a picture of her newborn twins, daughter Agnes and son Ocean, on Instagram on Sunday

Heard with her ex-husband Johnny Depp. The couple married in 2015 and divorced two years later in 2017

However, within minutes of sharing her post on US Mother’s Day on Sunday, theories began to circulate that the dad is Heard’s former boyfriend Elon Musk.

Why would anyone think this? Musk, the world’s richest man – and until recently right hand man to US President Donald Trump – has fathered at least 14 children and possibly more in a series of mostly unconventional relationships. He sees it as his mission to have as many children as possible – a ‘legion’ he says.

Earlier this year he was revealed as the father of a baby with influencer Ashley St Clair, reportedly telling her they would need to ‘use surrogates’ in order to have as many babies as he desired.

There has long been speculation that Musk and Heard created and froze some embryos during their 18-month romance, which caught fire after she and husband Johnny Depp broke up in 2016.

Much of this was driven by a statement from Jennifer Howell, a colleague of Amber Heard’s sister Whitney. When Heard was sued for libel by Johnny Depp in 2022 – over a piece she had written for the Washington Post alleging she was a victim of domestic abuse – Howell filed a statement into the US court saying: ‘Whitney told me…. [Amber] was in a legal battle with him [Musk]over the rights to embryos they had created together. He wanted to destroy them, and Amber tried to keep them to have a baby.’

Although Musk has said their romance was ‘mind bogglingly painful’, he has also maintained that he and Heard remained friends after breaking up, which could lend credence to the idea that he would support her in having his children.

In August 2017, confirming the split, he said: ‘We are still friends, remain close, and love one another.’

Speaking to his biographer in 2023, Musk said the romance had been ’18 months of unrelenting insanity’. He added: ‘It was brutal… I am often a fool but especially for love.’ His brother Kimbal described Heard as ‘toxic’ and ‘a nightmare’.

Musk seems to have been completely consumed by Heard’s beauty and spent two months designing and having made a costume based on the character Mercy in the video game Overwatch – which he rather boastfully then posted on Twitter. ‘She did dress up as Mercy. It was awesome,’ he wrote.

Amber Heard commented to Musk biographer Walter Isaacson: ‘I love him very much. Elon loves fire and sometimes it burns him.’

Heard pictured in 2018. She now has three children and lives in Madrid

Musk described his romance with Heard as ’18 months of unrelenting insanity’

During the 2020 libel trial brought by Depp against The Sun newspaper, London’s High Court heard Musk visited Heard at the LA penthouse she shared with Depp during their marriage. Depp was driven into a jealous crisis by her friendship with the tech tycoon, calling him ‘Mollusk’ and threatening to cut off his penis in text messages seen by the court.

But Musk, 53, told The New York Times he didn’t sleep with Heard behind Depp’s back and their relationship started after she filed for divorce. ‘I definitely was not having an affair with Amber while she was married to Johnny; this is totally false,’ Musk insisted. He also denied rumours that he, Heard, and her friend, the model Cara Delevingne, had engaged in a threesome.

I revealed in May 2023 that in the aftermath of that 2022 trial in the US, Heard, who had been spotted holidaying in Mallorca, had moved to Madrid permanently.

A friend of hers confided that Heard, then already a mother to Oonagh, had decided to break away from Hollywood. It was always in part a response to the trolling which followed her court battles with Depp. At one point, over 400,000 signed a peтιтion calling for her to be replaced in the Aquaman films in which she plays Mera.

Depp has always denied complicity in the social media attacks.

Heard’s friend told me earlier this year that she was ‘very happy’ in her new life, and only intermittently in touch with her old friends in entertainment.

He added: ‘I get the impression that she doesn’t really long to hear from any of us. She is doing her own thing, on her own, and enjoying a peaceful life. She never talks about coming back to Hollywood. Maybe one day she will, but it isn’t on her mind at this point. She isn’t much interested in news of showbusiness people either.’ Heard, 39, has roots in Texas, where she was raised by her mum Patricia, who died in 2020, and dad David. Her daughter Oonagh Paige was born in April 2021.

Heard explained on Instagram: ‘Four years ago, I decided I wanted to have a child. I wanted to do it on my own terms. I now appreciate how radical it is for us as women to think about one of the most fundamental parts of our destinies in this way.’

She is fluent in Spanish and appears to have settled into friendships with a group of other well-heeled Spanish mums in the fashionable district of Chamartin in the north of the city. Daughter Oonagh is at an elite private Catholic school near to her house, where fees stand at around 8,000 Euros (£6,700) a year.

Home is a 1.5million euro (£1.2million) five-bedroomed property and she has some Atletico Madrid players as neighbours. Locals say the actress rented a property under the name of Martha Jane Cannary, the real name of legendary Wild West cowgirl Calamity Jane, before buying.

A neighbour said last year: ‘She lives here and I often see her walking her daughter to school in the mornings. She wears a cap and sunglᴀsses and normal clothes and keeps a low profile.

‘She lives here in peace, this is a neighbourhood filled with famous people, including football players, but no one bothers each other, I think that’s why she likes it – she has completely integrated into the community.

‘When Amber first arrived, there were lots of pH๏τographers parked outside the home but now there are none. No one here really knows who she is, they don’t recognise her in the street like they would in America.

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‘When I saw all the commotion around her I had to ask my friend who she was and she explained she was Johnny Depp’s ex.’

She is a regular visitor to an American supermarket called Taste of America, where an employee said: ‘She comes here a lot in the afternoon with her little girl, my colleague has served them many times. I ᴀssume she likes to buy things that remind her of home, we have all kinds of stuff from the USA here.’

The store sells Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Betty Crocker baking products, pumpkin pies and American candy. She’s also been spotted running in the El Retiro park in the centre of Madrid.

Heard hasn’t worked as an actress since the US trial in Virginia, however. She said that she had lost faith in the American justice system, which found largely in Depp’s favour and ordered her to pay him $10million (£7.6million) in compensatory damages and $350,000 (£265,000) in punitive damages – which she argued she didn’t have.

The jury also awarded the actress $2million (£1.5million) in compensatory damages in her countersuit against Johnny Depp.

Following the case the parties reached a settlement which would result in $1 million being paid to Depp by Heard’s insurance, which he pledged to give to charities.

Heard said she could not stand the idea of appealing the Virginia decision as it would mean reliving the ‘humiliation’ of recounting their fights and the marriage yet again, and being used as ‘social media fodder’.

‘I defended my truth and in doing so my life as I knew it was destroyed,’ she said.

One film, In The Fire, had been completed before her trial and was screened at the Taormina Film Festival in 2023. Heard warmly thanked the festival for its support and warm reception and told the publication ᴅᴇᴀᴅline: ‘What I have been through, what I’ve lived through, doesn’t make my career at all. And it’s certainly not gonna stop my career.’

But it seems that – for now at least – her plans lie in another direction. Despite the trauma of the past few years, Heard has indeed managed to create exactly the family she craved, on precisely her own terms.