Widow of tragic Guinness heir dies in Spain
NICKY BROWNE, the widow of tragic Guinness heir Tara Browne, has died in Spain.
The 69-year-old passed away after a battle with cancer.
She is best known for the 1967 court battle to keep her children in which she fought against the matriarch of the Guinness family Oonagh, Lady Oranmore and Browne.
Just before the case her estranged husband, Guinness heir Tara Browne, was killed in a car crash which was immortalised in a Beatles song by his friends John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
The High Court case was over the future of Nicky’s two young sons with the Guinness heir, Dorian, 3, and Julian, 18 months. The judge ordered that the boys should live with their grandmother, and friends have said Nicky, then a 24-year-old former art student, never recovered.
A farmer’s daughter from Ulster, she was born Noreen Anne MacSherry and has lived in Spain ever since the custody battle.
Long-time friend Maggie Deane said: ‘She suffered on and off from depression ever afterwards. She felt this terrible guilt over her sons.
‘Their grandmother was very rich and very powerful and Nicky had absolutely no chance against her. The grandmother went on to send the boys to various boarding schools and Nicky believed they didn’t have the settled family life which she so much wanted to give them. She only saw them at school holidays and she got very down at times.’
Nicky, who died in hospital in Marbella, was just 21 when she married Tara, three years her junior, in 1963 after meeting at art college.
They later parted and Tara died in 1966 after crashing his Lotus Elan into a parked car in Chelsea, London.
It inspired the haunting opening verse of A Day In The Life, which was hailed by Rolling Stone magazine in 2004 as the Beatles’ greatest song.
Adds Maggie: ‘Nicky wasn’t ever interested in the Guinness money. She simply wasn’t that type of woman. She only wanted her boys.’
It is understood her friends and family are making arrangements for her cremation in Spain.