| The Right Honourable The Earl of Snowdon GCVO, RDI |
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| Born | Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones 7 March 1930 London |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | photographer |
| Known for | Ex-husband of Princess Margaret, ex-brother in-law of The Queen |
| Title | Earl of Snowdon |
| Term | 6 October 1961 – present (50 years, 134 days) |
| Spouse | Princess Margaret (6 May 1960 - 1978) Lucy Lindsay-Hogg (15 December 1978 - 2000 [Serparated]) |
| Children | David, Viscount Linley Lady Sarah Chatto Lady Frances von Hofmannsthal Jasper Cable-Alexander |
| Parents | Ronald Armstrong-Jones Anne Messel |
Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon, GCVO, RDI (born 7 March 1930) is an English photographer and film maker. He was married to Princess Margaret, younger daughter of King George VI and younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II. He is known professionally, and credited, simply as Snowdon.
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Armstrong-Jones was born the only son from the marriage of the barrister Ronald Armstrong-Jones (1899–1966) and his first wife, Anne Messel (1902–1992, later Countess of Rosse).
His maternal great-grandfather was the Punch cartoonist Linley Sambourne (1844–1910) and his great-great-uncle Alfred Messel was a well-known Berlin architect.
His parents separated when he was young and as a schoolboy he contracted polio. For the entire six months that he was in Liverpool Royal Infirmary recuperating, his only family visits were from his sister Susan.[1]
Armstrong-Jones was educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he studied architecture. While at Cambridge, he coxed the winning Cambridge boat in the 1950 Boat Race.[2] After university, he took up a career as a photographer in fashion, design and theatre. As his career as a portraitist began to flourish, he became known for his royal studies, among which were the official portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, and the Duke of Edinburgh for their 1957 tour of Canada.
In the early 1960s, he became the artistic adviser of the Sunday Times magazine, and by the 1970s had gained a reputation as one of Britain's most respected photographers. Though his work includes everything from fashion photography to documentary images of inner city life and the mentally ill, he is best known for his portraits of world notables (the National Portrait Gallery has more than 100 Snowdon portraits in its collection), many of them published in Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The Daily Telegraph magazine. His subjects have included Barbara Cartland, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Blunt and J. R. R. Tolkien.
In 2001, Snowdon was given a retrospective exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Photographs by Snowdon: A Retrospective, which later travelled to the Yale Center for British Art. More than 180 of his photographs were displayed in an exhibition that honoured what the museums called "a rounded career with sharp edges."
He also co-designed, in 1960–1963, with Frank Newby and Cedric Price, the aviary of the London Zoo. He also had a major role in designing the physical arrangements for the 1969 investiture of his nephew Prince Charles as Prince of Wales.[3]
He has been married twice. He was married first to Princess Margaret (1960 to 1978) and second to Lucy Mary Lindsay-Hogg (1978, separated 2000).
In February 1960, Snowdon, still known as Antony Armstrong-Jones, became engaged to the Queen's sister, Princess Margaret, and they married on 6 May 1960 at Westminster Abbey. The couple made their home in apartments at Kensington Palace. As he had been without title, he was created Earl of Snowdon and Viscount Linley of Nymans in the County of Sussex on 6 October 1961 due to concerns over the prospect of a British princess giving birth to a child without a title. The Snowdon title has centuries-old royal associations, since the name Snowdon was borne by the Welsh princes and the House of Gwynedd before 1282, though here it was granted as a nod to Armstrong-Jones's Welsh ancestry. A Barony of Snowdon (sometimes spelled Snaudon) was a subsidiary title of King George II's son Frederick, Prince of Wales. The subsidiary Linley title honoured Lord Snowdon's great-grandfather Linley Sambourne as well as Nymans, the Messel family estate in West Sussex. David, Viscount Linley, was born 3 November 1961, and a second child, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, on 1 May 1964.
The marriage began to collapse very early and publicly. Various causes may have lain behind the failure. In 1953 Margaret had been dissuaded from accepting the proposal of Group Captain Peter Townsend. On her side there was a penchant for late-night partying, on Snowdon's, an undisguised sexual promiscuity. ("If it moves, he'll have it," was the summing up of one close friend.[4]) To most of the girls who worked in his Pimlico Road studio, there seemed little doubt that Snowdon was gay; to which he himself responded, "I didn't fall in love with boys – but a few men have been in love with me."[4] In his 2009 memoir, Redeeming Features, British interior decorator Nicholas Haslam claims that he had an affair with Snowdon before the latter's marriage to Princess Margaret, and that Snowdon had also been the lover of another leading interior decorator, Tom Parr.[5] Others have pointed out that both Snowdon and Margaret were stars in their own right, and were used to being the centre of attention, leading to clashes over primacy. Margaret was initially surprised that her husband had no intention of giving up his rising photographic career. Because Snowdon travelled around the world to complete assignments, he was often separated from his wife for many weeks.
Their break-up lasted sixteen years, accompanied by drugs, alcohol, and bizarre behaviour by both parties, such as Snowdon's leaving lists between the pages for her to find, of "things I hate about you".[4] According to biographers Sarah Bradford and Anne de Courcy, one note read: "You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you".[4][6] When high society palled, Snowdon would escape to a hideaway cottage with his lovers, or on overseas photographic assignments; most people, including the Royal Family, took his side.[4]
The marriage ended in divorce in 1978, when Roddy Llewellyn briefly entered Princess Margaret's life and Snowdon played the outraged husband.
In 2004 it was claimed that Snowdon fathered a daughter shortly before marrying Princess Margaret.[7] Anne de Courcy reports the claim by Polly Fry, born in 1960, in the third week of Lord Snowdon's marriage to Princess Margaret, and brought up as a daughter of Jeremy Fry, inventor and member of the Fry's chocolate family, and his first wife, Camilla, that she was in fact Snowdon's daughter. [8] Fry asserted that a DNA test in 2004 proved Snowdon's paternity. Jeremy Fry rejected her claim, and Snowdon denied having taken a DNA test.[7]
After his divorce from Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon married Lucy Mary Lindsay-Hogg (née Davies), the former wife of film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, on 15 December 1978. Their only child, Frances Armstrong-Jones, was born seven months later, on 17 July 1979.
Lord and Lady Snowdon separated in 2000 after the revelation that Snowdon, then aged 67, had fathered a son, Jasper William Oliver Cable-Alexander (born 30 April 1998), with Melanie Cable-Alexander, an editor at Country Life magazine.[9]
On 16 November 1999 Lord Snowdon was created Baron Armstrong-Jones, of Nymans in the County of West Sussex. This was a life peerage given him so that he could keep his seat in the House of Lords after the hereditary peers had been excluded. An offer of a life peerage was made to all hereditary peers of the first creation (i.e., those for whom a peerage was originally created, as opposed to those who inherited a peerage from an ancestor) at that time.
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| Peerage of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| New creation | Earl of Snowdon 1961 – present |
Incumbent Heir: Viscount Linley |