The 60-year-old actor is selling the former family home in Oxfordshire after the break-up of his 24-year marriage to wife Sunetra, 53, in February last year.

He is now dating comedian Louise Ford, 32, and bought a £4.65 million house in North London last September. The house sale has fuelled speculation that Rowan – estimated to be worth £70 million – could be heading for a costly divorce from Sunetra, with whom he has two children, Ben, 21, and Lily, 19.

Last month the star also sold his beloved – and very rare – McLaren F1 supercar for £8 million.

The luxury property has five bedrooms, three reception rooms and four bathrooms as well as an indoor swimming pool.

It also has a tennis court within the six-acre grounds, which are situated just yards from the River Thame.

The estate agent’s brochure describes the Grade II listed building, dating from 1777, as ‘a classic mix of Georgian and contemporary architecture’ with ‘fine Queen Anne frontage’.

The Blackadder star bought the house in 2000 for about £1 million.

Rowan first met Sunetra in the late 1980s, when she was working as a BBC make-up artist, and they wed in 1990.

The couple were building an £11 million dream home elsewhere in Oxfordshire when they split last year.

Atkinson met stand-up Ford – star of Sky sitcom Chickens – in 2003 when they starred together in the West End play Quartermaine’s Terms.

Do my eyes deceive me? Can this picture, left, really be of Elizabeth Hurley – famed for surviving on watercress soup and six raisins a day – tucking into some carbs? 

Elizabeth, who turned 50 last month, posted the snap on Instagram alongside the caption: ‘Yes! Bring on the toasted cheese and ham.’

The Royals actress – now filming a second series of the soap – went on to claim she’d recently devoured 8,000 calories during a meal out with her former sister-in-law Samantha Nayar at London’s Cafe Colbert. The phrase ‘hard to swallow’ leaps to mind.

(dailymail.co.uk)