They were so ill-matched in marriage – as their insanely destructive divorce and notorious legal battles proved – that perhaps it’s no surprise to learn Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s lives truly are now poles apart.

The evidence was all too clear in pictures published this week showing a ponytailed Heard, pretty in pastel trainers, walking along the seafront of Cadaques, a picturesque white-washed fishing village on the Costa Brava, as she celebrated her 40th birthday.

With her were her three children, Oonagh Paige, four, and twins Ocean and Agnes, who were born last May. They were in a group along with a nanny and another family with similarly aged children.

Cadaques may be a magnet for A-listers from Hollywood and Spain alike – attracted by a resort that has remained much as it was when the Spanish Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí moved there in the 1930s – but, equally, it’s hardly Beverly Hills.

Indeed, since she set up home in the Spanish capital Madrid – a fact I revealed in this newspaper in March 2023 – Heard has largely gone to ground, adopting the lifestyle of a well‑heeled European yummy mummy rather than an A-list actress.

Today, the centre of her life is her beautiful young family, achieved with the aid of a surrogate. ‘She is a great mom,’ a friend told People magazine last year.

She lives in the luxury neighbourhood of El Viso alongside bankers, hedge-fund managers and diplomats.

Like them, she sends her children to a local school and is spotted on the school run every day. She also goes running regularly in a local park.

One Hollywood associate says he hasn’t heard from her in months, and adds that she doesn’t seem curious about the fashionable celebrity crowd she used to hang out with.

Resolutely single, friends say she doesn’t seem at all interested in having a partner. Indeed, since she moved to Madrid she appears to have had no one of interest in her life at all.

There was a romance with writer and activist Eve Barlow that is thought to have ended in 2022. Before this, she was in a relationship with film-maker Bianca Butti, which concluded in 2021.

All in all then, she has a very different lifestyle to Depp’s.

I’m told that in the past few years the actor has had a ‘long string’ of love interests, pretty much unbroken and all under the radar.

I am also told that all these liaisons have been ‘purely casual’, and some hook-ups are with fans and hangers-on.

And while Heard has opted for Spanish obscurity, Depp, in contrast, has now made the first step in his Hollywood comeback.

He appeared in Las Vegas last Thursday at CinemaCon – the convention where movie business owners and fans take a sneak peek at forthcoming big hits – and drew delighted whoops from cinema owners.

Little wonder – where Depp goes, audiences generally follow, and the commercial prospects for his forthcoming big-budget headline role as Ebenezer Scrooge in Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol look very healthy.

‘It really has been an extraordinary privilege,’ Depp, 62, said about playing the role, which is thought to have netted him £6million – his biggest payday in years. He looked relaxed as he waved and grinned to acknowledge the cheers.

‘He’s in spankingly good form,’ confirmed his co-star Sir Ian McKellen, who added that he had found the actor: ‘Effervescent, funny, irreverent, serious – all at the same time. It was a bit of a love fest, really. I fell in love with him.’

Depp’s four-year hiatus from Hollywood – taken following his bruising legal debacle with Heard in which he lost a case of defamation in London but then won in the US – is well and truly over. His role in this Dickens adaptation can be seen from November 13.

It’s taken him time to bounce back. He spent years in retreat on his own private Caribbean island and with his late friend, the guitar hero Jeff Beck, at the latter’s estate in East Sussex.

For a long time he didn’t want to have anything to do with the movie business, and instead played guitar and painted.

But roles in independent films were the start of a big relaunch – he starred in Minamata and in the French language movie Jeanne du Barry. Sources close to him say he’s happy and creatively fulfilled. ‘He’s very much an artist with a capital A,’ says someone who’s been spending time with him.

After a prolonged financial crisis, he also seems to be finally living within his means.

Home is a rented, secluded manor house in rural Kent, just around the corner from Beck’s widow, Sandra.

But where Depp has found contentment in his artistic output, Heard has thrown herself into motherhood.

She announced the arrival of infants Ocean and Agnes by sharing an image of their tiny feet on Instagram. The boy and girl were born via surrogate – like their sister Oonagh – and Heard said she was ‘elated beyond words to celebrate the completion of a family I’ve strived to build for years’.

Her path to their birth will not have been simple. Spain is a country where surrogacy is not legal and ‘renunciation contracts’, signed by biological mothers to give up babies they birthed, are not legally valid.

It’s thought that Heard, who remains a US citizen, arranged for the surrogacy to take place in America, where there are no such restrictions.

She wrote on Instagram: ‘Becoming a mother by myself and on my own terms despite my own fertility challenges has been the most humbling experience of my life.’

Beyond this, though, she has shared little of her parental journey – and is yet to reveal who the children’s father is.

Some believe she might have used an anonymous sperm donor. Others, meanwhile, are convinced that the father is none other than her former boyfriend Elon Musk.

Musk, the world’s richest man, has fathered at least 14 children – and possibly many more – in a series of mostly unconventional relationships. He sees it as his mission to have as many children as possible to stave off population collapse.

There has long been speculation, never confirmed, that Musk and Heard created and froze some embryos during their 18-month romance, which came after she and Depp split in 2016.

Although Musk has said their romance was ‘mind-bogglingly painful’, he has also maintained that he and Heard remained friends after breaking up, which perhaps lends credence to the idea that he would support her in having his children.

In August 2017, confirming the split, he said: ‘We are still friends, remain close, and love one another.’

Heard, for her part, commented to Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson: ‘I love him very much. Elon loves fire and sometimes it burns him.’

If Musk is the father of Heard’s children, there can be little doubt that the sight of her so happy with her family would be a real dagger to Depp’s heart. For as much as he’s moved on, he still has a real loathing for Musk.

During the 2020 libel trial brought by Depp against The Sun newspaper for calling him a ‘wife-beater’, London’s High Court heard that Musk visited Heard at the LA penthouse she shared with Depp during their marriage.

It drove Depp into a raging crisis: He called Musk ‘Mollusk’ and threatened to cut off his penis in texts seen by the court. Musk told The New York Times he did not sleep with Heard behind Depp’s back and their relationship started after she filed for divorce.

‘I definitely was not having an affair with Amber while she was married to Johnny; this is totally false,’ Musk insisted.

Depp, though, was driven to the brink by jealousy. This is the man who wrote ‘easy Amber’ in blood on a mirror, having cut the tip of his finger off, after being convinced she was having an affair with the actor Billy Bob Thornton.

The tumultuous time she spent with Depp – they were married for 15 months but were together for more than three years – now appear far behind Heard. Her days are dominated by the needs of her children.

She is a regular visitor to an American supermarket in Madrid called Taste of America, where an employee described her as coming ‘here a lot in the afternoon with her little girl – my colleague has served them many times. I assume she likes to buy things that remind her of home.’

She also observes American traditions such as Thanksgiving and Halloween. A rare Instagram post from her in October last year showed herself and her ‘Minnies’, as she calls her children, out trick-or-treating in fancy dress.

She is not much interested in a return to film-making, and was last in front of a movie camera in 2022, when she took part in a documentary, Silenced, for a lawyer friend about how the legal system gags women. It has yet to find a distributor.

There was also a part in an independent film called In The Fire, shown at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily in 2023. It took £16,000 upon its release in Italy and £880 in Russia, the only other territory in which it was released.

Heard’s move to Spain was always in part a response to her break-up from Depp – or, more accurately, the global trolling that followed their court battles.

There were millions of death threats and humiliating memes, and more than 400,000 people signed a petition calling for her to be replaced in the Aquaman films in which she plays Mera.

Now, though, Spain is home. She once told a videographer, in fluent Spanish, that she plans to stay there for good, and appears to have settled into friendships with a group of other Spanish mums.

She lives in a £1.2million property and has some Atletico Madrid players as neighbours. As for how she supports herself, she’ll still receive residuals from past film work.

While she got £5.2million in her divorce settlement from Depp, which she had promised to donate to charity, much of that was swallowed up by her subsequent legal battles with him.

One neighbour said: ‘She wears a cap and sunglasses and normal clothes and keeps a low profile.

‘She lives here in peace. This is a neighbourhood filled with famous people, including football players, but no one bothers each other. I think that’s why she likes it.’