MICHAEL Jackson's ex-wife has confessed the late star is not the biological father of their two children, according to a British news report.

Deborah 'Debbie' Rowe, the mother of Prince Michael I , 12, and Paris, 11, has spoken of her 'sham marriage' to Jackson, the online edition of the Sydney Morning Herald reported quoting British tabloid newspaper News of the World.

Jackson, 50, died on Friday following a heart attack in his Los Angeles home.

Ms Rowe, who married Jackson at the Sheraton Hotel Sydney in November 1996, said she was artificially inseminated by an anonymous donor and likened herself to one of the thoroughbred mares she now keeps on her California ranch.

'I was just the vessel. It wasn't Michael's sperm,' Rowe told News of the World in her first public interview with the paper.

'I got paid for it, and I've moved on. I know I will never see my children again."

Rowe revealed she and the Thriller singer never had sex and did not share a bed during their three year marriage, describing the union only as a friendship.

Prince and Paris now face an uncertain future, effectively orphaned, although they and their younger brother Prince Michael II born to an anonymous surrogate mother were reported to be in the care of Jackson's 79-year-old mother Katherine at the family estate in Los Angeles.

Ms Rowe, who met Jackson when she was a receptionist at a Beverly Hills dermatology clinic, where he went for skin treatments, said Jackson was lonely and desperately wanted children.

'Michael was divorced, lonely and wanted children. I was the one who said to him, 'I will have your babies'.

'It was a place in both of our lives when we were both very lonely. We both loved animals. That's how we got talking.

'He started letting me into the treatment rooms, letting me help the doctor with him. He would come in three or four times a week. I started talking to him about his divorce from Lisa Marie (Presley, his first wife).

'I offered him my womb...it was a gift. It was something I did to keep him happy.'