Madonna and Guy Ritchie Set to Announce Divorce

The British press is buzzing today with news of an imminent divorce announcement expected from Madonna and Guy Ritchie. The celebrity couple has been one of the most closely followed in the world throughout their 8-year marriage. That media attention was always most extreme in their home country of England. Madge was never far from a headline in the British tabloids and her movements and those of her now famous children were often closely tracked.

The couple is worth an estimated $525 million, with the vast majority of that wealth being amassed by – and belonging to – Madonna. It’s expected that a detailed pre-nuptial agreement would have been in place from the beginning of the marriage and the fact that Ritchie himself is worth a comfortable $35 million should eliminate the need for a heated legal dispute over finances. Most experts seem to think that all of the details of their financial and custodial arrangements would have been worked out prior to the announcement of divorce.

British sources are reporting that the couple prefer to have the entire divorce proceeding finalized by late December and that Madonna may have actually wanted to wait until her current world tour ended before formally announcing the break-up. Her "Sticky and Sweet" tour has scheduled dates on Wednesday and Thursday in Boston.

Rumors of trouble in the marriage were taken to a new level over the summer as Madonna was implicated as the "other woman" in the much-publicized break-up of Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez and his then-wife Cynthia.