A ROYAL SCANDAL REHEATED
Margaret and toyboy Roddy are given The Crown treatment
WHEN she was pictured canoodling on a beach, it was the first of a series of marriage scandals that would dog the Royal Family for two decades.
Now the affair between Princess Margaret and her toyboy lover Roddy Llewellyn has been recreated for the new series of The Crown.
Dressed in very Seventies style, Helena Bonham Carter, 52, in floral swimsuit, plays Margaret, with Harry Treadaway, 4, in unbuttoned shirt and headband as Llewellyn.
The scenes for the Netflix drama, shot in Algeciras, southern Spain, include the couple kissing, and Treadaway massaging Miss Bonham Carter’s shoulders.
Pictures which emerged in a tabloid newspaper in February 1976 showed the Queen’s younger sister – then 45 and married to Lord Snowdon – with landscape gardener Llewellyn, 28, in swimsuits on the Caribbean island of Mustique. By then the couple were nearly three years into what would be an eight-year affair.
Within weeks of the photographs being published, Margaret and Snowdon announced their separation. They divorced in 1978.
Both Margaret, who died in 2002 aged 71, and Snowdon, who died last year aged 86, were rumoured to have had numerous affairs during their 18-year marriage.
Llewellyn, 71, the son of Olympic gold medal-winning show jumper Sir Harry Llewellyn, is now a baronet and married with three grown-up children.
The third season of The Crown, with Olivia Colman as Elizabeth II, will be shown next year.