Lady Anne Glenconner, Princess Margaret’s former aide reveals more about the royals and how The Crown is true to life
Lady Anne Glenconner, Princess Margaret’s former aide, has revealed how she helped Helena Bonham Carter with portraying her on-screen, as she revealed how the monarchy will survive despite recent royal scandals.
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As royal lovers binge-watch the latest series of Netflix hit The Crown and gasp at Helena Bonham Carter’s fiery, flirtatious Princess Margaret, the confidante of the Queen’s sister reveals the portrayal is entirely true to life.
Lady Anne Glenconner was the Princess’s lady-in-waiting for 30 years and helped award-winning actor Bonham Carter prepare for her starring role alongside Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth II.
At 87, she has released her memoir Lady In Waiting which details her adventures with Margaret, the Queen, and a host of stars from Mick Jagger to David Bowie, Rupert Everett to Judi Dench.
Lady Anne’s family life is worthy of a Netflix drama itself. She survived a mad husband, the tragic loss of two of her boys, and fought hard to wake her remaining son from a coma.
How can you meet someone actually depicted in The Crown and not ask if they got it right?
At the heart of the latest season is Margaret’s doomed marriage to Lord Snowdon and her scandalous affair with a man nearly 20 years younger than her.
The show depicts Lady Anne (played by Nancy Carroll) setting up a 43-year-old Margaret with the handsome 25-year-old Roddy Llewellyn, only to regret leading the Queen’s sister down a path of sin.
“It is absolutely true,” the real Lady Glenconner told News Corp.
“I said to (my husband) Colin ‘What have we done?’ Roddy was never meant for Princess Margaret.
“We needed to make up numbers at a party at Glen, our country house, and someone suggested this young man, Roddy Llewelyn.
“The minute he met Princess Margaret, sparks flew. Nothing you could do.”
Lord Snowdon meanwhile had affairs with boys, affairs with girls, and would ultimately leave her for the much younger photographer Lucy Lindsay-Hogg.
But he couldn’t stand Margaret had a lover too.
“I did feel bad. But Tony (Lord Snowdon) treated her pretty poorly I thought,” Lady Anne said, “Princess Margaret didn’t want a divorce. Roddy made her happy.”
Lady Anne has not watched “her” episode of The Crown yet but she spent hours with actors Carroll and Bonham Carter before filming, and has bonded with Colman over their love of their shared home, Norfolk.
Princess Margaret has been characterised over the decades as the original “wild royal” with her infamous love affairs, celebrity chums and alcoholism.
Lady Anne wanted to show another side of Princess Margaret in this memoir.
“I partly wanted to correct the record. So many of the things written about Princess Margaret are untrue,” she says.“ She was a great friend, someone I confided in. She was very intelligent.
“Of course she was grand – her father was king-emperor of half the world.”
Lady Anne was prepared for “grand” people. Her mother was the Queen’s lady-in-waiting and her father worked for George VI.
She was a maid of honour at the Queen’s coronation and then travelled the world with her sister.
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One of Lady Anne’s favourite trips was Princess Margaret’s tour of Australia in 1975.
“The Australian press was very rough with her. They kept shouting at her ‘Where’s Snowdon? Where’s Snowdon?’” she recounts.
“So I had to come up with a way of getting them close to her. So I thought a cocktail party on the train! It worked like a treat. They loved her after that … we all liked a drink in those days.
“We met koalas in the zoo, this cuddly, little koala who peed all over my leg.
“We also had the Princess at Bondi Beach … she was reluctant at first but I found a pair of flats. ‘OK, Anne, you win this time,’ she said in her dry way.
And where else does a royal go but to the horse-races?
“We went to the races in Melbourne and Princess Margaret got stuck in the mud so I had to go to the cloakroom and find someone who could clean them … the woman put them in the microwave.”
She does not want to comment on the recent royal scandals which have rocked Buckingham Palace in recent weeks.
Prince Andrew has been forced into early royal retirement over his links to notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Prince Harry and his American wife Meghan are distancing themselves from the rest of the family.
But Lady Glenconner has known Prince Charles since he was young. She believes he and William can keep the monarchy afloat.
“Charles will make a marvellous king. And I’m very fond of the Duchess of Cornwall. They are so happy now,” she says.
“The Cambridges also live here in Norfolk and I see them about. People are so used to them, and they have such lovely children. The Duchess is wonderful, I think.
“One day, I hope William will be king and she will be queen. We’ll be lucky to have them.”
The Windsors may be the hook into Lady Anne’s memoir, but the Glenconners are the real stars.
Lord Colin Glenconner was an eccentric and his Caribbean island Mustique became a hot spot for royals and rock stars. But he could be cruel.
Lady Glenconner’s tales of their honeymoon from hell are now legend after she reduced Colman and Bonham Carter to tears of laughter on The Graham Norton Show.
When they went to Paris, Colin appalled Lady Anne when he took her to a sex show.
The honeymoon got worse: Lady Anne was attacked by a wild bird during a cock fight and Colin berated her for ruining his bet. During another row, he trapped her in a mechanical in-wall bed.
Throughout the marriage, Lord Glenconner had multiple affairs and a terrible temper.
When he died in 2010, he left everything in the will to his valet. But Lady Anne still says she doesn’t regret sticking by him.
“That was the worst thing he ever did. I don’t know why he did it,” she says.
“You marry the whole person … if only he didn’t have such a temper, we would have got on fine. I don’t regret it all.
“But I’m happier than I have ever been. I’m out of the shadow of both Colin and Princess Margaret now.”
Nothing Lord Glenconner threw at her would compared to losing her children.
Her son Charlie died of hepatitis C in 1996 due to a long battle with heroin addiction and her other son Henry died of AIDS in 1990.
“Part of the reason I wanted to write the book is because AIDS is still prevalent, it hasn’t gone away. And of course drug addiction is still a massive issue,” Lady Anne says.
“It was a bit like going to a psychiatrist. People have come up to me and said how helpful the book was.”
Her third son, Christopher, fell into a coma after a motorcycle accident in 1987.
Knowing her other sons would die young, she wasn’t going to let him go and enlisted Britain’s top nanny Barbara Barnes to help.
“Barbara Barnes had been our nanny and she had just been with William and Harry. She came and stayed with me for six months and we nursed Christopher back to life,” Lady Anne says.
“The doctors said there would be no hope. He woke up … Barbara and I ended up writing in a journal how we as lay people helped Christopher.
“I was so proud when he was sitting in the Graham Norton audience the other day with his daughter … I couldn’t be happier.”
Lady Anne is now settled in Norfolk but still up for adventure. As described in her book, she, Camilla Parker-Bowles and Dame Judi Dench accidentally ended up on a nudist beach recently.
What’s next? Australia.
“Some of my grandmother’s family went out there … I love it. I’ve been invited on a speaking tour through there and New Zealand. It would be amazing to go to Bondi, to relieve all those moments with Margaret.”
Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown is available for $32.99.