Simone Ashley posed for a sweet snap with best pal Emma Raducanu during her 29th birthday celebrations over the weekend. The Bridgeton actress took to Instagram to gush over her loving friends and handsome boyfriend for making her birthday ‘the best day ever’. British athlete Emma, 21, looked happier than ever as she celebrated Simone’s intimate bash.
Simone captioned her post: ‘Thank you to my love for organising the best day ever. I adore all my friends so much.’Â Emma’s outing with Simone comes after she withdrew from the Miami Open last month.
“Thank you to my love for organizing the best day ever. I adore all my friends so much,” she wrote on Instagram.
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The tennis star shot to fame while making her Wimbledon debut at 18-years-old and has had a tough time with injuries recently. The former US Open champion spent the second half of last year recovering from ankle and wrist surgery that saw her side-lined from May, the latest in a long line of injury problems since winning at Flushing Meadows in 2021.
She made her return at the start of this year and showed promising signs by making the third round of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells before losing to Aryna Sabalenka. Emma’s withdrawal in Miami casts doubt over her availability for Great Britain’s Billie Jean King Cup tie with France on April 12-13.
Simone is best known for playing Kate Sharma in Bridgerton series two and Olivia Hanan in Sex Education. Last year, Simone confirmed her relationship with boyfriend Tino Klein, who is the CEO of the GP Ice Race, a new winter event in Austria.
It’s unclear how long Simone and Tino have been dating, but it has been reported that they met at the F1 race in Monaco. In 2022, the Mail on Sunday revealed Simone’s first serious relationship was with coffee brand manager Luke Richardson, who is 13 years her senior. The couple met in an East London café where he was working as a barista and quickly moved in together.
They then moved to Los Angeles as Simone pursued her fledgling screen career, but their two-year relationship ended when Grimsby-born Luke decided to leave California. Simone previously told how the role as feisty aristocrat Kate Sharma in the Netflix period drama Bridgerton helped with her mental health after a break-up.
The Surrey-born actress, who has 3.4 million Instagram followers, said: ‘I was going through a break-up in 2019 to 2020, just before I got Bridgerton, and I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was being so hard on myself.’Â It is unclear if she was describing being upset at the break-up with Luke, which was thought to have been in 2017, or a split from a subsequent partner.
One of Luke’s family friends said: ‘Everything was great for a couple of years. We genuinely thought they were on track to marry and have kids. ‘It was a serious relationship. There is no doubt that Luke was really in love with Simone and the feeling was clearly reciprocated.’
