Husbands one, two and three have already netted her £18 million but Susan Crossley’s efforts to secure a slice of her fourth husband’s £45 million fortune hit the buffers last night.

On the eve of a keenly awaited court hearing, Mrs Crossley, 50, abandoned her claim on the fortune of her estranged husband, the property developer Stuart Crossley, 62.

She had signed a prenuptial contract originally, saying that she would not claim a penny if the marriage, which only lasted 14 months, broke up.

Hours before today’s High Court hearing at which Mrs Crossley intended to pursue her claim, it was announced she had dropped it. The decision is a boost to the status of prenuptial agreements, which lawyers had predicted would be certain to be upheld by the courts in her case.

Last night Mr Crossley's solicitor, Mark Harper, of the London law firm Withers, said: “Mrs Crossley has abandoned her claims.” Privately Mrs Crossley has accepted that she stood no chance after a Court of Appeal ruling before Christmas in which judges made clear their view that the prenuptial agreement was valid.

Mrs Crossley, whose previous husbands were Kevin Nicholson, heir to the Kwik Save fortune; Peter Lilley, adopted son of Thomas Lilley, chief of Lilley and Skinner shoes; and the racing magnate Robert Sangster, had tried to argue that she was entitled to half the share of Mr Crossley’s wealth because, she claimed, he had not disclosed every aspect of his assets.

She maintained that the prenuptial agreement was invalid because he failed to tell her about “tens of millions” he had in offshore accounts.

But in a ground-breaking ruling in December, three Court of Appeal judges dismissed her challenge to a judge’s ruling that the “prenup” should first be evaluated before looking at any further claim she might have. Mrs Crossley had argued that this denied her access to the courts.

Her lawyers had described the streamlined one-day hearing to look first at the “prenup” as a “knockout blow” because it meant that her claim for a share of her husband’s wealth would probably be thrown out.

Lord Justice Thorpe, who made the decision with Lords Justices Keene and Wall, said that judges had a duty to shorten the trial process where “very rich people are demanding full scale trials” and were straining the courts’ overstretched capacity.

At the time Mr Harper said that the ruling was “a significant step forward for prenuptial agreements” and Mr Crossley said: “This is a fair decision. I am upset that our marriage failed. Sadly, my wife is a career divorcée.”

Alex Carruthers, a family lawyer with the London firm Hughes Fowler Carruthers, said that in future judges would be likely to be “more forthright in upholding prenuptial contracts, if the circumstances are right”.

Mr Crossley had met his future wife in the summer of 2005 and they were married in early 2006. He had four children, Mrs Crossley had three, one by each of her previous marriages. By March 2007 the Crossleys had separated and in August she filed for divorce.

Lord Justice Thorpe, giving judgment in December, said that before they married they employed “highly experienced lawyers” to write their “pre-nup”, which allowed them to walk away after a divorce with what they had taken into the marriage. “This seems to me to be an entirely appropriate step for the parties to take.”

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