Edition: U.S. / Global

Paula Yates, 40, British Television Host and Rock-Scene Celebrity

Published: September 19, 2000

Paula Yates, a British television personality known for her outrageously flirtatious interviewing style and for her relationships with the rock stars Bob Geldof and Michael Hutchence, was found dead at home here on Sunday. She was 40.

The cause was apparently a drug overdose, the authorities said.

Reared in north Wales, Ms. Yates left school at 16 and moved to London, where she joined the emerging punk scene and embarked on an extravagant -- and extravagantly public -- life. When she became enamored of Mr. Geldof, who was then the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, she followed the band on tour until Mr. Geldof became just as smitten with her, and they embarked on a relationship. They married 10 years later and had three daughters, Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches and Pixie.

Ms. Yates reveled in the spotlight, posing naked in the stuffy Reform Club for Penthouse magazine and compiling a book of photographs called ''Rock Stars in Their Underpants,'' which Andy Warhol called ''the greatest work of art in the last decade.'' She also wrote several books for children, but it was not until she started her television career as a co-presenter of ''The Tube,'' a show about music, that she became a celebrity in her own right, affecting a bubbleheaded, giggly personality that belied her sharp intelligence, friends said.

In 1992 she began presenting ''The Big Breakfast Show,'' a morning television program in which she often interviewed guests while lying on a bed in the studio. One guest was Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of the band INXS, and the two fell madly in love. She left Mr. Geldof, setting off a bitter, tabloid-fueled divorce and an equally bitter fight for custody of their three daughters. Mr. Geldof won.

Ms. Yates and Mr. Hutchence had an intensely passionate affair and one child, a daughter they named Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily. But their relationship was marred by drug use and extreme behavior that ended when Mr. Hutchence was found dead, hanging by his belt, in a hotel room in Sydney, Australia, in November 1997.

Ms. Yates, who once said that Mr. Hutchence was ''God's gift to women,'' seemed never to recover from his death, spiraling into a depression that resulted in her admission to a mental hospital and at least one suicide attempt of her own.

It was hard for her to hang on, she once said in an interview. ''It's only the mothering instinct that makes you willing to suffer every day,'' she said. ''Right now, I think living is a noble gesture.''