How former Irish model Hogan has found her feet with TV host Clarkson

The woman behind the man on Clarkson’s Farm, former model and actress Lisa Hogan, has been a regular on the show alongside her partner Jeremy Clarkson since the launch of the Amazon Prime show in 2021.

The Irish woman has been involved with the farming operation since the show first launched three years ago and has a more prominent role on the latest season in particular, which features her and Clarkson taking on a new challenge as pig farmers and meeting a great deal of struggle and tragedy along the way.

Her most significant role on the farm is operating the Diddly Squat shop, selling local produce, from rum brewed with honey from Cotswold bees to sheep’s wool jumpers and branded merchandise.

A growing online lifestyle brand unto itself as well as a shop that punters queue for hours to get into, Hogan told The Sunday Times the shop “makes a fair bit” of money, though she would not be drawn on an exact figure.

Away from the confines of the farm shop, Clarkson’s Farm has shown a side of Hogan that is a far cry from her previous life as a model and actress. She does not shy from getting down in the muck, does plenty of the dirty work and shows a deep love for the animals under her and Clarkson’s care.

She gave up her previous work as an artist and sculptor to focus solely on the farm and managing the shop.

Hogan (50) was born in Dublin, the daughter of architect Maurice Hogan and former model Arlene Underwood, and has two sisters.

A student at Alexandra College in Milltown, Hogan was just 14 when her father died suddenly of a heart attack.

Speaking to the Irish Independent in 2017, she remembered him as “a wonderful, loving man” and fondly recalled his great sense of humour.

Her mother later married Raymond Keaveney, the director of the National Gallery and a brother of Peter and Mark, founders of the Peter Mark hairdressing chain.

In May 1996, Hogan met aristocrat Baron Steven Bentinck, a nephew of the Madrid-based billionaire and art collector Baron Heinrich von Thyssen. They married in 1998 and have three children – Wolfe, Alice and Lizzy.

She had previously dated English jockey and stockbroker Roger Weatherby and had been linked for a time to Gavin O’Reilly, the son of businessman and former Ireland rugby player Tony O’Reilly.

Bentinck and Hogan split time between several homes: from London, New York and Essex to a mansion in a Swiss ski resort, a castle on the Isle of Wight and a 147ft yacht, the Zaca A Te Mona, or Peace of the Sea.

They separated in 2005 and Hogan employed the services of Fiona Shackleton, the lawyer who represented Prince Charles in his divorce from Princess Diana. A highly publicised divorce was finalised in 2011.

During her time as an actor, she was cast in the 1997 comedy Fierce Creatures, written and produced by Monty Python star John Cleese.

She had a near-death experience during her time working on the film when she was 25. The plane she was travelling to London on had an emergency crash landing on the A40 dual carriageway in England, crashing into a van after going through an airfield fence.

“We took off from Palma and I thought everything was fine for a while,” she told the Irish Independent.

“The captain had tried to make me sit in a certain part of the plane. I insisted on sitting where I was, which was just as well because that was the area where the van came through when we crashed and I would have been killed instantly.”

Hogan and former Top Gear co-host Clarkson (64) have been together for seven years and first met at a party in 2017.

Writing in The Sunday Times during the early days of the pandemic in May 2020, Hogan said she had started filming for the first season of Clarkson’s Farm herself as the camera crew had been forced to leave due to restrictions.

Worn down by “the Groundhog Day routine” of lockdown, she said she “hit a slump” around four weeks in.

“The next evening, at dusk, he takes me deep into a wood. We climb up onto a wobbly plank high in a tree opposite a badger hide. Our badger-watching plan doesn’t get far because we chat too much,” she said.

“Jeremy loves nothing more than to tell an interesting story he’s read or heard, then I tell him something that he doesn’t find interesting at all, but we natter on our perch until it’s too dark to see anything.”

The third season has only just been released but a fourth has already been commissioned, with filming set to get under way this year.

‘A plane which she was travelling on had an emergency crash landing on the A40 dual carriageway’