The hidden message behind THAT passionate Wimbledon kiss between Sam Taylor-Wood and Aaron Johnson... as insiders tell DOLLY BUSBY all about their 23-year age gap marriage

Their off-white outfits were exquisitely co-ordinated. Equally matching were their smiles of delight as they held hands for all to see.

And as for their very public kiss? The perfect act of revenge, said onlookers, to prove doubters wrong.

It’s been 18 years since Fifty Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Wood, 59, and her actor husband Aaron Johnson, 36, began dating, which instantly attracted huge controversy because of their 23-year age gap.

Yet the years between them were barely visible this week at Wimbledon as the pair kissed passionately on Centre Court. Indeed the age gap, which was screamingly obvious when they first posed on the red carpet together in 2009, has evaporated, as Sam has become ever more youthful – with no work done, said an insider – and Aaron has lost his baby face.

My source in the stands said: ‘He always looks good, but she looked younger than usual... When I’ve seen them before, she’s looked considerably older than him. That age gap didn’t look as obvious this week.’

The pair were showing the sort of besotted physical closeness most enduring couples can only dream of. Sat either side of them, Wylda, 16, and Romy, 14, their two daughters giggled at their parents’ tactile display.

They are, as one friend told me, ‘still in utter marital bliss’.

Such happiness is a stunning riposte to the trolls who have relentlessly targeted the couple since they met when Sam was 42 and Aaron just 18. From being accused of being ‘gross’ and ‘disturbing’, Sam in particular has been much attacked for their romance.

In the face of so many years of hatred, this week’s appearance was, said one insider, ‘an act of defiance’ – a public message that their love is the real deal.

Aaron – who has starred in blockbusters including Godzilla and Bullet Train and is now being tipped to be the next James Bond – looked especially at ease in his role as husband and father.

When asked about the Wimbledon kiss, my source said: ‘It was first and foremost a family day out with the girls, but I’m sure they would’ve found it funny to put on a little show – two fingers up to the trolls, so to speak.

‘Sam has a really cool-girl attitude when it comes to that stuff; she truly doesn’t care. They’re just not bothered and totally in love.’

The couple and their daughters did not take seats in the celebrity enclave the Royal Box, as children are not permitted there except the Wales family. Instead, the Taylor-Johnsons sat in the stands. The pair are fiercely protective, so taking their teenagers would have been a big decision.

Their home life is sweetly low-key and locals in Bruton, Somerset, often see the tight-knit family strolling down the High Street.

Home is a stylish £1.85million historic farmhouse in the Mendip Hills filled with dogs, cats, cows, pigs, chickens and rabbits.

And Sam has stressed the family are never apart. When her daughters from her first marriage – Angelica, now 29, and Jessie, now 19 – were younger, the family of six would move en masse whenever one had to travel for work.

To this day, Sam and Aaron ensure their work alternates, so one parent can always be with their children. Few could have credited such solid middle-class domesticity would have emerged from a union which initially attracted attention for all the wrong reasons.

The director first met Aaron when he was reading for the role of the young John Lennon for her film Nowhere Boy.

She was 42 and recently separated from Jopling, to whom she had been married for 11 years.

At the very end of Nowhere Boy’s nine-week shoot, Sam and Aaron’s chemistry tipped from professional to personal.

According to Aaron himself, he was the one pursuing her and proposed exactly a year after they first met to the minute. A crew member said at the time: ‘From the start, Aaron was dead set on her. Sam resisted for a long time.’

(Meanwhile, her ex-husband was dating singer Lily Allen, then 23, managing an age gap of a mere 22 years.)

By the time Nowhere Boy premiered in 2009, Sam and Aaron were engaged and Wylda was born the following year.

In June 2012, they were married at the luxury hotel Babington House in Somerset. An eight-year stint in Los Angeles followed before they went back to Somerset. ‘Post-pandemic, it was that feeling of wanting to come home,’ Sam said.

From there, it has been a settled life, one belying Aaron’s years. Sam has argued he is ‘an old soul’: ‘Since childhood, he’s spent so much time away from home and in the company of established actors. I think it made him grow up fast. This whole age thing is abstract to us anyway. We don’t ever think about it.’

It’s easier to understand her tough response to public criticism after hearing about her battles with cancer: first of the colon, aged 30 and then breast cancer three years later, when she underwent a mastectomy.

‘While I’m not completely confident about myself, I do view my scars as medals, as badges of honour,’ she disclosed in an interview two years ago.

Nothing bothers her now, particularly her trolls, because ‘the most frightening thing I can do is walk through those hospital doors’. Indeed, so profound is her fear of cancer she has cancelled appointments at the last minute, not telling her husband.

‘He gets very irate,’ she has said. ‘I turn into a tantrum-y five-year-old like, “I’m not going”.

‘I could throw myself from a moving car on the way to any hospital appointments. Aaron has to double lock the car to make sure I can’t get out, then get me there, push me through the doors, hold me down. It’s quite a process.’

It’s a portrait of a supportive marriage still full of passion, as this week’s photos show. As Sam once put it: ‘No one’s getting hurt. We’re in a loving relationship Everyone who matters is happy. Exactly which bit of that do I have to defend or apologise for?’

Today, one might say it’s 40-love to them: the most unlikely couple in showbiz to have found a passion that confounds their critics.