• 'Extraordinary bequest' agreed
His profile grew as he worked from the mid-1970s with music artists AC/DC, Def Leppard, the Boomtown Rats, Bryan Adams, Foreigner and The Cars but his reputation among New Zealanders was enhanced in 2005 when he and his former wife bought Motatapu and Mt Soho high country stations near Wanaka.
In 2009 they added Glencoe Station and in 2011 Coronet Peak Station and they spent several months each year living in their new multi-million-dollar home on Motatapu Station.
Mutt Lange was born in Mufulira, in what was then Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, on November 11, 1948.
He was raised in Durban, the son of a South African father who worked in the mining industry and German mother.
A country music fan, he studied at Belfast High School in South Africa and began a band in which he played rhythm guitar and sang harmony.
The band broke up when he moved to London and married Stevie van Kerken.
The marriage failed several years later.
He met Shania Twain while working with her and they married on December 28, 1993.
In August 2001, their son Eja was born but on May 15, 2008 a spokesman for Mercury Nashville announced the couple were separating because Mr Lange had been having an affair with Ms Twain's best friend, Marie-Anne Thiebaud.
The couple divorced in June 2010, and Ms Twain is now married to Ms Thiebaud's ex-husband, Frederic.
Ms Twain, who no longer owns the New Zealand properties, later wrote a tell-all book From This Moment On in which she told how she had put heart, soul and dreams into her New Zealand home.
In February 2011 Mr Lange was hailed an eco-hero by Peter Willsman, of the Wakatipu Wilding Conifer Control Group (WCG), who supported his application to the Overseas Investment Office to buy Coronet Peak Station.
Mr Willsman was reported in the Otago Daily Times as saying the station was ''heavily infested in parts'' with both wilding pines and goats.
Lange's ''impeccable record'' at conserving Soho's other holdings, Motatapu, Mt Soho and Glencoe stations near Wanaka, would make the purchase beneficial to the community and the country.
''It's Mutt's desire to see tussock, beech and the natural flora and fauna of our back country preserved,'' Mr Willsman said.
Twain and Lange had caused some ructions when trying to gain planning approval for a house estimated at $3.6 million on Motatapu Station.
The plan was initially rejected by the Queenstown Lakes District Council, which decided it had more than minor environmental effects and was not in harmony with the landscape, but it was later approved by an independent commissioner.
