Eurovision’s Katie leaves £8m to charity
FORMER Eurovision Song Contest host Katie Boyle left a £14million fortune, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, with £8 million of it going to charity.
In her will, the TV personality, who died last March at the age of 91, left £3.6million to be shared between 109 friends and relatives. Of that, £2 million goes to her sister, Margherita Imperiali Di Francavilla, a child psychologist.
After taxes, the rest goes to good causes including the Actors Benevolent Fund, Compassion In World Farming and the Alzheimer’s Society– all of which receive £10,000.
The same sum goes to both the Dogs Trust and The Battersea Dogs’ Home, where she served on the committee for more than 25 years. Boyle owned Yorkshire terriers and was an agony aunt for Dogs Today magazine during the 1990s.
Her executors will decide where much of the charity money goes, but the star – born in a Florence palace as the daughter of an Italian marquis – asked that £3,000 be shared between the staff at her three favourite restaurants and £1,000 be given to actress Maureen Lipman ‘as a token of our friendship’.
Boyle inherited much of her fortune from her third husband, Sir Peter Saunders. He produced The Mousetrap, which has been running in London’s West End since 1952, and left £11million when he died in 2003. Ms Boyle was 20 when she came to Britain in 1946. She soon began modelling and appeared in several films before finding TV success in game shows including What’s My Line? But her most prominent role was hosting Eurovision on the four occasions it was held in the UK between 1960 and 1974.
Her first marriage in 1947 to Viscount Boyle ended in divorce in 1955. A year later, she wed Greville Baylis, a Lloyd’s underwriter. They stayed together until he died in 1976.