Mystery over the royal love letters
the actor who has taken over from James Norton in Grantchester, is a sensitive sort of chap. He was so moved on meeting Tom Hanks that he burst into tears.
Gravesend-born Tom, 28, who plays alongside Hanks in the forthcoming film Greyhound, says of being with the American star: “I started to cry when I first saw him.
“I couldn’t believe that I was in the same room with the man who is pretty much responsible for me being an actor. As a kid I watched Saving Private Ryan and thought that was the kind of film I wanted to do.”
THE RECENT demise of Prince Charles’s friend Lord Tryon has raised a sensitive question: what has become of the amorous letters that passed between Tryon’s spirited wife Dale and the prince? The letters were treasured by Melbourne-born Lady Tryon, known as Kanga, as tangible proof of the time when she was the bachelor prince’s lover in the early 1970s (before he became preoccupied by erstwhile mistress Camilla Parker Bowles).
As a teenager Charles had first met Dale, daughter of a printing magnate, at a dance when he spent two terms at school in Australia. They met again, and became lovers, when she moved to London to work in PR.
But the voluptuous blonde wasn’t considered suitable marriage material for the prince and in 1973 she married merchant banker peer Anthony Tryon, with whom she had four children.
Lady Tryon’s close friendship with Charles continued, although she became increasingly indiscreet, telling favoured journalists how the prince would call her out of the blue and ask whether he could drop by her Wiltshire home for what she euphemistically called a “comfort stop”.
She founded a successful fashion business – called Kanga – in 1983 but was eventually overcome by health issues, becoming dependent on painkillers and alcohol following uterine cancer in 1993 and a paraplegic after a fall. In 1997, two months after she had been divorced by Anthony, she was dead from septicaemia at just 49.
Says a family friend: “Dale would often leave the Prince’s letters around so visitors would recognise his ‘spider handwriting’. But shortly before her death, at a time when she was in despair and confusion, the letters went missing.
“One theory is that Anthony, who had always known about the affair, posted them back to Charles. But they could be anywhere; they certainly haven’t turned up in all the stuff the family have been sorting through after Lord Tryon’s death.”
Penny Smith
Although presides over the Costa book awards ceremony, her own literary career has come to a halt. After three novels, the broadcaster is struggling to produce another. “I’ve got plenty of ideas but writing is so solitary and by nature I’m a herd animal,” she told me at the awards.
If she does finally put her thoughts on paper, the result is likely to be sensuous – in her first opus she memorably described the effects on her heroine of using a self-pleasuring device called a Rampant Rabbit.
Happily Penny, 60, whose former lovers include Rory Bremner and Paul McKenna, has her own rabbit in the form of actor Vince Leigh, who has long shared her duvet. She still feels passionate about Vince, especially his hirsute back. She purrs: “I love the way the hair goes up my nose when I rub against it.” Cold Feet attracts its fair share of online traffic as viewers vent their opinions on the new series but 51, will not be peeking at any comments on social media.
“I’m nervous of it; I don’t want to read something that I don’t want to see. I’ve witnessed other people being burned by it,” says the actress, who also does her best to discourage her son Wilf, 14, and daughter Hero, 11, from spending too much time online when they are at home in the Somerset village of Bruton.
“If they’re on screen for a long time, you can watch their moods change in front of your eyes. The best thing was when the dog chewed through the cables and we had a whole weekend without wi-fi.” Is there no end to the talents of
The polymath politician is fluent in sign language; he says he was taught by his mother who used to work at the Aberdeen School for the Deaf.
Yet I recall Govey, 51, becoming rather hard of hearing himself at Oxford when he seemed unable to catch the sobbing entreaties of a girlfriend as she begged him not to end their relationship.
Despite being dumped by this unlikely lothario, the lovestruck lassie continued to turn up at his college every day to iron his shirts.
Michael
has robust opinions on most matters, so does she ever aspire to be prime minister?
“No,” she states firmly, “I think we need a bloke. Women are quite used to being led by men. That’s part of our job. Men don’t really like to be led by women. They don’t mind being spanked by them but they don’t want to be led by them.”
She continues (giggling): “Actually, what we really want is a bloke on a horse – someone like the Duke of Wellington. Or a headmaster. People quite like them as a figurehead.”
Carrington, Lord
A fond farewell to
the former foreign secretary whose memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey last week. The Tory statesman brought clarity to complex situations, tutoring me on world affairs whenever we met.
During one of our last chats he was vigorous in his warnings about the danger of the current Russian regime: “It was actually better as the Soviet Union during the Cold War, when everyone was very careful about putting a foot wrong for fear of a nuclear war. It imposed a discipline that has now disappeared.
“The Americans no longer wish to spend their money in policing the world and who will take over? Certainly not Britain, we don’t really even have a Navy any more.”