War of Winner’s ‘witches’
A f lamboyant f ilm legend. His well-off widow. A hard-done-by PA. ‘Conniving’ exes. A £50m fortune. And a strange voodoo doll. Action!
IN LIFE he was a shameless showman, a famed bon vivant and acidtongued critic who loved nothing better than to bark orders and brag outrageously about his wealth. Irrepressible film director Michael Winner liked to boast that he was worth as much as £75million, and enjoyed the fruits of his success with a seemingly endless carousel of beautiful women.
Some, he had promised, would inherit a small fortune in his will – and to one at least, his generous words came true. Today Geraldine Winner, the woman he married 16 months before his death, lives in a luxurious £4.5 million West London flat, from where she can consider how to spend and invest her £20 million bonanza.
Others, though, have not been quite so fortunate. For them, Winner’s legacy has brought boundless anxiety and simmering resentment at the way it has been handled. And now one of them, his long-suffering PA and confidante Dinah May, has finally spoken out about the extraordinary dispute engulfing those he left behind.
Dinah is not the only one of Michael’s friends to feel his wishes have been overturned. In particular, she wants to set the record straight about his estate, revealing that Winner did not die broke, a spendthrift ‘pauper’ as many still believe, but with an impressive fortune of some £50 million. Then there is the disturbing case of the voodoo doll, complete with pinpricks, apparently found among Winner’s possessions.
At the centre of the whole furore is his widow Geraldine, who colourfully tweeted that her former rivals were ‘conniving, calculating exes’ or, as she put it in one memorable email, ‘witches’. This is the woman who, it is sensationally claimed, attempted to short-change her rivals by concealing the true extent of Winner’s fortune.
Today Dinah, 63, is exhausted by the legal struggle following Win- ner’s death, but is determined to speak. ‘The truth is that I went through two years of hell just to end up with some of what he wanted me to have,’ she says. ‘I was made to feel as if I was trying to take something that was not left to me. It was the most miserable time of my life.
‘I lived on Valium, barely slept at nights and was ill most of the time.’
The story has its roots in Winner’s single-minded determination to lead a glamorous but decidedly single life. He laughingly claimed to have a congenital defect that prevented him from marrying, yet loved being surrounded by beautiful women.
There was no shortage of opportunity. He had made his name with the Death Wish film series starring Charles Bronson, and increased his wealth with outrageous newspaper columns and successful television car insurance adverts, featuring his ‘calm down dear’ catchphrase.
He lived a life of ostentatious excess and for years readers of his newspaper columns were regaled with tales of his indulgence. Sitting imperiously in his beloved 47-room Queen Anne revival mansion in Kensington, he was insensitive to the austere mood of more recent times.
He was conspicuously generous, too, buying flats for at least three of his ex-girlfriends and paying their medical bills. His lovers included actress Jenny Seagrove, whom he was with from 1987 to 1994. He dated the former Benny Hill girl Lorraine Doyle between 1984 and 1986 and Vanessa Perry, an actress 30 years his junior, for five years until 1999.
But it was years earlier, when he was a 21-year-old film-maker, that he had first met 16-year-old Geraldine Lynton Edwards, then an aspiring actress and ballet dancer.
They began dating after she auditioned for his first film; when they parted she moved to France and married. With advancing years, however, Winner’s views on companionship seemed to change. Geraldine made a triumphant return into his life, and their engagement was announced in 2007.
They married in 2011, with Sir Michael Caine and his wife Shakira as witnesses. Already frail, however, Winner passed away in January 2013, aged 77.
Naturally, when his will was published, Winner had remembered those close to him. Geraldine was handsomely provided for and Winner left around £1 million for former girlfriends Catherine Nielson, who lived with him for many years and whom he nicknamed Sparkle, and his exotic former secretary Paola Lombard. Both had life-threatening health problems, and Winner had always been financially supportive.
Dinah was also rewarded and it was richly deserved. She had suffered Winner’s vexing behaviour for three decades, as she detailed in her book, Surviving Michael Winner, serialised in The Mail on Sunday. The bequest, he had told her, was both her pension and a token of his appreciation.
Despite his never-ending tantrums and explosive temper they had shared a deep and lasting friendship. Her job included washing his hair in beer once a week and plucking his nasal hair. It was she who sat by his bedside holding his hand as he lay dying, after losing a long battle with liver disease.
Winner left Dinah an ex-council flat in Farley Court, Kensington, where she had lived for 25 years, plus £300,000 out of affection and appreciation. She was also to receive an old Suzuki jeep which she had used to drive Winner around London. Yet she never got the jeep and eventually settled for less than the bequest.
Her troubles began when lawyers told her she would have to pay 40 per cent inheritance tax.
Then Dinah discovered that the three-bedroom ground floor flat, like other properties owned by Winner, was saddled with a huge mortgage of about £600,000. It was valued at about £850,000 when he died. She was
‘I’ve been through two years of hell, on Valium’
shocked, saying Michael had told her that it would all be paid. ‘He wrote a codicil to his will saying the debt, by which he meant the mortgage, would be paid off,’ she explains. ‘Michael made it clear that his bequests to me should be clear of inheritance tax and gift tax as his estate would pay it.
‘He told me, “Don’t worry darling, the debts on the flat will be paid”.’
But this turned out not to be the case and so she found herself liable for the huge debt. Dinah chooses her words carefully, and is quite clear that she doesn’t think any laws have been broken by anyone. She says, too, she is grateful to Michael for what she did eventually receive.
In her view, Geraldine could have stepped in at any time see that Michael’s wishes were respected.
Originally a hairdresser and model from Merseyside, Dinah was crowned Miss Great Britain in 1976 and became an actress.
Blonde and vivacious, she met Winner while she was working on Brookside in the 1980s, and travelled the world with him as his PA for three decades, sometimes acting as hair and make-up artist on his films.
They were never lovers, but she occasionally acted as his ‘walker’ when he was between girlfriends. She was the one constant female he relied on through most of his life. And she says he proposed to her – twice.
Their evident closeness did not go down well. Even before probate had been published, Geraldine had complained in a tweet about the ‘conniving, calculating exes... and the sharks trying to steal’ from the estate.
Paola Lombard and Catherine Nielsen have declined to talk; neither is in good health. But Dinah’s troubling account of events is supported by Barry McKay, a businessman and friend of Winner.
He had become aware of the conflict after Geraldine invited him to act as a trustee for the Police Memorial Trust (PMT), a charity set up by Winner in the 1980s to honour officers who die in the line of duty.
It was not mentioned in the will but it was due to receive – by something called a deed of variation – whatever was left after the will’s beneficiaries had been paid.
Mr McKay says Geraldine attempted to keep secret the full extent of Winner’s fortune from the other beneficiaries, including money held in the Channel Islands, and was attempting to limit the amount they would receive.
‘She did not want the other beneficiaries to know about the £30 million in Guernsey,’ he says.
‘She wanted me to help fight their claims on behalf of the charity. Geraldine said that if ‘the three witches’ ended up getting as much as they wanted there would be nothing left for the trust.
‘She told me they were being greedy and trying to take money from something which was so important to Michael.’
One email sent to Mr McKay from Geraldine said that she didn’t think it was ‘a good idea to publish the exact amount of money that Michael left... as Dinah May’s claim is still relevant and it could be detrimental to me and the PMT.’
Mr McKay believes Geraldine wanted to give the other women as little as possible. ‘Michael would be horrified to know that Dinah has been so badly treated,’ he says. ‘She was his rock. Of all the staff and women who came and went she was the person who remained by his side for decades. Michael trusted her completely. In my opinion Geraldine was being greedy and vindictive.’
He declined to sit on the trust, insisting instead that Geraldine do right by Dinah and the others.
‘I just couldn’t understand why she hated them,’ says Mr McKay. ‘She actually used the word hate and she called them the three witches. I later saw a voodoo doll with pinholes with the left leg bandaged, like Michael’s was, and the words ‘three witches’ scrawled over the face. I have no ideas what it all meant, but it was very disturbing.’ The doll, along with some of Michael’s possessions, was rescued from a skip outside the house after his death. It was then passed to Dinah.
In a curious twist to this tale, Geraldine was attacked with an iron bar in her Knightsbridge apartment and held hostage for three hours during a robbery last year. Such was the animosity over the will that Dinah and, it is understood, the other beneficiaries were interviewed by the police.
The robbers, who took jewellery and other valuables, were never caught despite a £10,000 reward and an appeal on BBC’s Crimewatch.
Dinah eventually settled with the estate, but had to sell the flat and move out of London. She says: ‘I’ve decided to speak out now because it’s the right thing to do. Michael wanted me to have a home of my own and would have been furious to know that I’ve had to sell it and leave London.’
She is determined, too, to restore Winner’s reputation as a wealthy and generous man. ‘What happened to me was shattering,’ she adds, ‘and disrespectful to Michael’s wishes. I want people to know he was a goodhearted person, who looked after a lot of people close to him.’
‘Geraldine was being greedy and vindictive’