![\"Lady](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/gettyimages-909068482.jpg\"\/)
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Lady Anne (right) during the full dress rehearsal of the Queen’s Coronation at Westminster Abbey, 1953<\/p>\n
Daily Mirror Staff \/ Mirrorpix \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
Bonham Carter \u2013 who is her cousin by marriage \u2013 was a fellow guest when Lady Anne triumphed on The Graham Norton Show, drawing amazed gasps and whoops of laughter as she told the audience how her mother\u2019s attempts at sex education revolved around her dog, Biscuit: \u2018You remember Daddy\u2019s labrador getting on top of Biscuit? Well, that\u2019s what happens when you get married and have sex, except you\u2019ll probably be lying down in a bed.\u2019 She topped that with an account of Colin Tennant, her exuberant, frightening, half-crazed maverick multimillionaire of a husband, taking her, during their honeymoon, to watch a couple having sex in a seedy hotel room. They asked the still-virginal Lady Anne if she wanted to join in. She declined. (It might be argued that Lady Anne had married beneath her: Tennant, the eldest son and heir of the 2nd Baron Glenconner, was merely an Hon, whereas Lady Anne \u2013 n\u00e9e Coke \u2013 was the eldest of the three daughters of the 5th Earl of Leicester, robbed of the title and of Holkham Hall, the glorious Palladian house<\/a> she was brought up in, by primogeniture. The title went to a cousin living<\/a> in South Africa.)<\/p>\n Her friend Rupert Everett had advised her on how to approach Norton\u2019s chat show: \u2018Do it, Anne.\u2019 And, she notes, \u2018Olivia [Colman, another guest] lives in Norfolk\u2019, so she knew people would be on her side; but it wasn\u2019t until Chadwick Boseman, the star of Black Panther, came up to her afterwards, shook his head and said, \u2018Gee whizz, lady!\u2019 that she knew \u2018I had done OK.\u2019 More than OK: she\u2019d become hot property<\/a>. More books are to follow; there\u2019s talk of a film; and, before the coronavirus lockdown, she had been gracing the better kind of provincial theatre<\/a> with An Evening with Lady Glenconner. Not entirely a surprise: her mother, the Countess of Leicester, sent her out as a travelling saleswoman for her pottery in the UK and the USA. Shrinking violets can\u2019t do that. And she certainly played her part in transforming Mustique, bought as a mosquito-ridden wasteland by her husband in the 1950s, into the ghetto for the rich and titled it is today. (Tennant acquired the island with some of the vast industrial fortune his family had made; some of that had gone on Glen, their estate in the Scottish Borders, where Colin \u2013 by then Lord Glenconner \u2013 once sprinkled the moors with blue paper flowers to mollify his aesthete uncle Stephen, who thought heather vulgar.)<\/p>\n Still, \u2018showbiz star\u2019 is not the figure she cuts in her kitchen, giving herself a Nescaf\u00e9 and me a builder\u2019s, served in cups and saucers decorated with red birds and flowers. Her streaked hair is beautifully cut, her flat black shoes shiny and her blouse a strong purple. In the loo is a framed copy of the Woman\u2019s Journal; on its cover, goldenhaired and ravishing, is a young Lady Anne Coke, as Glenconner was then \u2013 Greta Garbo gets one of the other coverlines. In the living room, the log fire is blazing \u2013 Princess Margaret used to insist on laying it when she stayed, during the many decades Lady Anne was her lady-in-waiting. There are family photographs on multitudinous side tables, a Daily Telegraph crossword open on a window seat and a coffee table book about Holkham Hall on a small green ottoman. Outside, through the sash windows, is the garden that Lady Anne used to weed while Princess Margaret washed her hostess\u2019s car. A cock pheasant shoots past the window. \u2018That\u2019s Colin\u2019s spirit,\u2019 Lady Anne says, laughing. \u2018Colin getting angry \u2013 I\u2019d never have got a word in if he\u2019d been here.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lady Anne (right) during the full dress rehearsal of the Queen’s Coronation at Westminster Abbey, 1953 Daily Mirror…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":694972,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,242,231134,6200,184986,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-694971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-features","tag-july-august-2020-issue","tag-magazine","tag-paywall-sample-for-0-days","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/694972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}