Beau Jessup

Beau Jessup died in October 2026 at the age of 27 while studying at Columbia Journalism School in New York. Columbia Journalism School's statement on its website, dated 28 October 2026, said the school mourned "the loss of Beau Jessup, a student in our M.S. program" and was working with her family to offer support. Dean Jelani Cobb wrote to the school community that "any loss within our school family is difficult to process." The school shared its statement on X on 11 November 2026, the same day Columbia News published its Notebook interview with her in her memory, with her family's permission.

The date, place and cause of her death have not been made public. British and American newspapers reported her death on 12 November 2026, and no funeral or memorial arrangements had been announced at the time of writing.

Beau Rose Jessup was born on 11 October 1999, the only child of the English actress and television presenter Lisa Maxwell and her partner Paul Jessup, who had been together since 1997 and married in 2014. Her mother is known for playing Samantha Nixon in The Bill for seven years, for her time as a Loose Women panellist between 2009 and 2014, and for having originally been cast as Daphne Moon in Frasier. Her father runs his own toy brand specialising in teddy bears.

She grew up in England, and in 2016 the BBC described her as an A-level student from Gloucestershire. In a 2026 interview with Columbia News she said that growing up as the daughter of a television actress gave her "an unusual awareness of the distance between people's lives and the stories told about them", and made her curious from a young age about who gets to tell people's stories.

Jessup studied for her A levels in Gloucestershire while launching SpecialName. She went on to study Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, and then Writing for Performance at the University of Cambridge, where her X profile described her as a master's student.

In 2026 she began an M.S. in Journalism at Columbia Journalism School in New York, as part of the Class of 2027, and was due to graduate in May 2027. She said she had been inspired there by Alexandra Zayas, an adjunct assistant professor who deepened her interest in investigative journalism, and by Assistant Professor Nina Alvarez, whose teaching showed her how rigorous reporting, verification and editorial judgment underpin responsible journalism.

The idea for SpecialName came during a 2015 trip to China with her father, when she was asked to suggest an English name for a young child. Jessup asked the mother to describe the child and her hopes for her, and suggested Eliza, after Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady.

She learned that many Chinese people pick an English name for school, travel or business, and that some end up with unfortunate choices. She told the BBC she had heard of people called Rolex, Gandalf and Cinderella. Her website, SpecialName.cn, asked parents to choose their baby's sex and five of twelve personality traits, then offered three English names with their meanings and a famous namesake, printed on a certificate that families could share on WeChat. Each request cost the equivalent of about 60p.

By September 2016 the site had suggested names for more than 200,000 babies and earned her about 48,000 pounds. Her own website says the story appeared in 187 newspapers in 22 countries in the first week of September 2016. In October 2016 she gave the TEDx Brighton talk How I Named 250,000 Chinese Babies. She was a guest speaker at the 2017 AllBright FoundHER Festival, appeared on BBC One's The One Show with Sir Richard Branson, and was featured by outlets including Inside Edition and CNBC Make It, which reported in March 2019 that the business was paying for her university studies. By then the site's counter had passed 670,000 names, and in 2026 she said it had helped name around a million babies.

At 16 she also wrote Beau's Community Bakes, a weekly column for her local newspaper that used recipes to start conversations with older people, many of whom were lonely or socially isolated.

Jessup said she had never really thought of her projects as entrepreneurial ventures. "I was less interested in starting businesses than in finding ways to connect with people," she told Columbia News. She saw Community Bakes and SpecialName as placing her on opposite sides of storytelling: in one she was the journalist representing other people's experiences, and in the other she became the story, watching her intentions interpreted and repackaged by journalists around the world.

Those experiences, she said, gave her an early appreciation of both the power and the responsibility of storytelling. She was drawn to cultural journalism, particularly how institutions, identity and social expectations influence the way people live and understand one another. With SpecialName she was careful to stress that families made the final choice: "the parent picks their baby's name, not me. I just give three suggestions."

Jessup was close to her parents, Lisa Maxwell and Paul Jessup. Her mother spoke publicly of her pride, and in September 2026 shared Columbia Journalism School's Class of 2027 photograph on X, writing that her daughter was "over in NYC making us all super proud." No spouse or children were reported. She had lived in Gloucestershire, London and Cambridge before moving to New York City for her studies.

SpecialName became one of the best known teenage business stories of the 2010s, used as an example of a young person spotting a cross-cultural need and acting on it. Her TEDx talk was viewed widely and, according to her website, is used in schools as a teaching tool. Hundreds of thousands of children in China carry English names suggested through her site.

At Columbia, the decision to publish her final interview in her memory, with her family's permission, gave her a last chance to tell her own story in her own words.

In December 2017 BusinessCloud included Jessup in its Female Founders 101 list. She was invited to give a TEDx talk in Brighton in 2016 and to speak at the AllBright FoundHER Festival in 2017. No other formal awards have been verified for this page.

Jessup's story was covered by BBC Newsbeat in September 2016 and then by newspapers around the world. She gave the TEDx Brighton talk How I Named 250,000 Chinese Babies, appeared on BBC One's The One Show with Sir Richard Branson, was a guest on The Steam School Show, and was featured by Inside Edition, CNBC Make It and Mamamia. In 2026 Columbia News profiled her for its Notebook series; the interview was published after her death.