David Walliams engaged to controversial Dutch model

The comic actor David Walliams, who has become as famous for his string of beautiful girlfriends as for his camp performances in Little Britain, has confirmed that he is to marry his latest supermodel girlfriend, Dutch-born Lara Stone.

"Yes, it's true, we're engaged and blissfully happy," he told the Sun newspaper after apparently phoning her parents in Holland to ask for their blessing.

At 25, the gap-toothed model who has been on the covers of Vogue and iD as well as doing catwalk shows, is 13 years his junior.

In October, Stone was at the centre of a controversy over a series of "blackface" photos taken by the New York photographer Steven Klein for Paris Vogue. American fashionistas denounced the work as "culturally insensitive".

Earlier the same year she made a short film with Klein, called Lara, Fiction Noir. It featured the blood-spattered model apparently executing a police officer, tying a man to a bed and sitting next to a corpse in a car.

Stone told British Vogue - whose cover girl she was in December - that she spent four weeks in rehab last year for treatment for her alcoholism. "I am a complete alcoholic," she said. "It used to be so easy to say to someone, 'Get me a bottle of vodka,' and they'd run and get it.

"Going to rehab was the best decision I ever made. The last six months have been the best of my life."

Walliams, who admitted in an interview last year that he wanted to marry and have children, has previously dated models Lauren Budd and Emily Scott and actress Patsy Kensit - all of them a far cry from the fat Thai bride his Little Britain character Dudley orders by mail, Ting Tong, played by Matt Lucas.