Lisa Vanderpump’s nephew Sam Vanderpump announced that he and his fiancée, Alice Yaxley, are expecting their first child — just weeks before revealing his end-stage liver disease diagnosis.
“Life is full of surprises, but this is the best one yet,” Sam, 28, captioned the pregnancy announcement shared via Instagram on September 16. “I can’t put into words how happy and excited we are!”
The post included a photo of Alice’s ultrasound scan surrounded by white roses aligned in the shape of a heart and the couple’s hands beneath the scan, as well as a snap of Sam kissing his fiancée’s pregnant belly and holding up the scan for the camera.
One day before the Instagram announcement, Sam and Alice, 24, opened up about the pregnancy to The Daily Mail.
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“It was definitely a surprise. I had missed a period, but I have polycystic ovaries, so it wasn’t a shock to have missed a period,” Alice explained. “But I did a test to be safe, and I wasn’t expecting anything, but it was positive. It was a big shock. We looked at each other and thought, ‘Wow, this is big,’ but everything else in our lives was so right. We knew we were obviously going to be together and there is never perfect timing, so we are changing the plan around.”
Alice added that she thought she wouldn’t be able to have children, so the pregnancy came as a “relief.”
Meanwhile, Sam told the outlet that they’re having a baby boy and already have a name picked out: “Marmaduke.”
“My dad is no longer with us, but he always wanted to call my brother ‘Duke’ because he believed my brother would one day become Prime Minister, Duke Vanderpump,” Sam said. (Sam is the son of Lisa’s older brother, Mark, who died by suicide in October 2018 at age 59.)
“I really love the name. My mum didn’t like it, so my brother was named Jack. My dad still had the last laugh by giving him the middle name Daniels. I think Marmaduke is fantastic, and we’ll call him Duke for short,” he continued. “There’s a great Downton Abbey scene where Maggie Smith and her daughter discuss a man named Marmaduke, which made us love it even more.”
Sam and Alice, who announced their engagement in March after six months of dating, told Lisa, 65, about the pregnancy during a recent episode of Made in Chelsea.
“This is great,” she told the couple. “I couldn’t be happier. I’m so happy for you.”
During the Monday, October 27, episode of the U.K. reality show, Sam revealed that he had been diagnosed with end-stage liver disease.
“There is no hope of my liver getting better, and he said, ‘I wouldn’t be having this call with you if I thought you could make it through the next four or five years.’ They’re sending me for a liver transplant assessment,” he said during a conversation with costar Ollie Locke.
When Ollie, 38, asked how Sam was feeling now, he responded, “The way I look at it, I’m healthy now. Hopefully I remain healthy all the way up until one day [when] they’ll give me a call, and I’ll go in for a surgery. And then I wake up and I’ll be healthier.”
Sam was previously hospitalized in December 2024 after he suffered from kidney and liver failure due to a genetic condition. He was then diagnosed with life-threatening sepsis.
“Although I had an underlying liver and kidney condition, it never affected my life. Doctors assured me I could live normally and that it might never impact me,” he wrote via Instagram in January. “While my condition played a role in how sick I became, the truly frightening part was sepsis, which can happen to anyone. 1 in 5 deaths in the UK are linked to sepsis, and 11 million people die from it globally each year. Many of these deaths could be prevented if symptoms are recognized and treated quickly. Sepsis is a race against time, and I was dangerously close to losing that battle.”
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