Duke’s adopted daughter wants to discover her ancestry on TV
HERS was, in so many respects, a fairytale upbringing, spent in the splendour of Goodwood, in West Sussex, with its two libraries, ballroom and music room — not to mention 24 bedrooms, ten bathrooms and a surrounding estate of 12,000 acres.
But actress Nimmy March, who’s appeared in everything from Coronation Street to Midsomer Murders, and, most recently, ITV’s Vera, yearns for a one-off role on a very different sort of show — BBC1’s Who Do You Think You Are?
‘I want to do it,’ she tells me at a party at London’s Groucho Club.
Nimmy’s need to piece together her family jigsaw is acute.
She was just six months old when she became the second mixed-race baby to be adopted by the 10th Duke of Richmond.
THE Duke and Duchess, who already had two children of their own, were vilified for ‘sullying the aristocracy’, as Nimmy once put it.
But their bond with their adopted daughters proved exceptionally strong, so much so that Nimmy, 62, admits she is ‘still reeling’ nearly a year after the Duchess’s death.
‘To me, she is Mum. I’m wearing her jacket,’ she says, adding that her grief has recently been compounded by the loss of her natural father, David Serame, ‘just 16 weeks ago’.
Nimmy, who is divorced with three children, had the consolation that she made contact with David, a South African musician originally from Lesotho, in 1999 and had seen him welcomed into the family fold by the Duke and Duchess.
The only communication from her Anglo-Irish birth mother, who was 17 and unmarried when she had Nimmy, has been a curt letter, sent to her adoption counsellor.
‘I put this child up for adoption as soon as I possibly could,’ it read.
‘As far as I am concerned, she is not my daughter.’
Nimmy tells me: ‘ I am not announcing her real name.’
That seems to be one secret even Who Do You Think You Are? will not be able to uncover.