‘I’m just a normal person, my friends don’t know my father is the Earl of Cromer’
THE model and actress daughter of the 4th Earl of Cromer has insisted she is a “normal person” with friends who are unaware she has a title.
Lady Venetia Baring, who descends from a long line of nobility, revealed details about her “unladylike” tendencies and her down-to-earth lifestyle in a new interview.
The 25-year-old cover star of Tatler’s March issue admitted: “None of my friends know that I have … a title … I have a word in front of my name. But I don’t ever use it, ever. I’m just a normal person ... Some people automatically think I have a stately home and a butler. And that’s not my life. I live paycheque to paycheque.”
Lady Venetia appeared in the 2023 action superhero film The Marvels and also starred as a model in the latest Dr Martens winter campaign.
She lives in Brixton, south London, with her two guinea pigs, Mochi and Dumpling, and has been with her boyfriend, a chef, for four years.
The British-chinese aristocrat and granddaughter of Esmé Harmsworth, the late Dowager Countess of Cromer, added that she is “covered in tattoos”, has brightly coloured hair and dresses “like a boy”.
She told the magazine: “I don’t give off the elegance people might associate with … I don’t know … posh people.
“Now that I’m older and able to choose my life, I’m doing it in a way that is genuinely me,” she said.
On Instagram, she regularly updates her 18,000 followers with holiday photographs, artistic portraits and pictures in lingerie. “If people think it’s unladylike, that’s OK with me,” she said.
Lady Venetia has had peerages in her family since the 18th century, and descends from the Rothermere and the Barings, the latter of which founded Barings Bank, one of England’s oldest merchant banks.
The 1st Earl of Cromer, Evelyn Baring, was a statesman and diplomat who served as consul general of Egypt from 1883 to 1907 during the British occupation. He was created Baron Cromer in 1892, Viscount Cromer in 1899 and Earl of Cromer in 1901.
Lady Venetia’s late grandfather, the 3rd Earl of Cromer, was a governor of the Bank of England in the 1960s and later served as the British ambassador to the US.
Her grandmother, meanwhile, was a temporary lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II from 1967 to 1971, before becoming an extra lady-in-waiting to the monarch for the following two decades.
Read the full feature in the February issue of Tatler available via digital download and on newsstands from Feb 1.