Rod Stewart’s Wife Penny Lancaster Says She Would’ve Left Him If He Didn’t Want More Kids: ‘That Would Have Been Very Hard’

Rod Stewart’s marriage to wife Penny Lancaster nearly hit a fatal snag when it came to family planning.

Lancaster, 54, opened up about the pair’s early days as a couple to the British magazine Saga, and revealed that Stewart — who at the time was a father of six — initially did not want to have more children.

The actress and model said that she knew she wanted kids of her own, and would have left the “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” singer, 80, had he not come around.

“Yes [I would have left him]. And that would have been very hard. But we just went with the flow,” she told the outlet. “Now Rod always says, ‘I wish I’d said yes [to babies] earlier, because then we could have had more children.’”

The star added that as recently as five years ago she and Stewart were discussing adopting, but “it ended up not happening.”

“We thought there might be too much of an age gap,” she explained.

The couple married in 2007, and are parents to sons Alastair, 19, and Aiden, 14. Stewart is also dad to daughters Sarah, 61, Kimberly, 46, Ruby, 38, and Renee, 33, and sons Sean, 45, and Liam, 31, from previous relationships.

Elsewhere in her interview with Saga, Lancaster joked that she’s actually a mom of three boys, as she considers Stewart “a big baby who needs my attention in a different way. I think all women would say that about their husbands.”

She also praised son Alastair, an aspiring filmmaker, as “a gorgeous boy, but also very kind and very polite like his father.”

Stewart previously opened up to PEOPLE about fatherhood in 2021, saying that he’s happiest when he sees “my kids and my wife with big smiles on their faces.”

“I have to be several different fathers because of the different age groups of my kids. You really have to treat all of them as individuals with individual problems,” he said. “For instance, my 15-year-old is dating girls, so I had to give him a sex lesson. I just told him what he should and shouldn’t do, but he’s on top of it. He was like, ‘Dad, I’ve got the internet. I know everything.’ “