After hanging up her crown, Claire’s new challenge as ‘the Dirty Duchess’
AS THE Queen in the first two series of The Crown, she was a model of respectability.
But in her latest role Claire Foy will play an altogether racier character.
She is to appear as Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, who was at the centre of scandal in the early 1 60s when her divorce case exposed her adventurous sex life.
A Polaroid photograph showed the society beauty – wearing nothing but a string of pearls – involved in a sexual act with a man in her Mayfair apartment.
Other photos showing a man engaged in a sex act also featured in the divorce.
In all the notorious shots, the man’s head had been conveniently cut off and for years his identity was preserved.
But in 2000 a TV documentary identified the ‘headless man’ – or rather headless men, because it named two lovers.
The man in the shot with the naked duchess was said to be Duncan Sandys, who was a Cabinet minister and Winston Churchill’s son-in-law. The other man was identified as Hollywood star Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Other men have also been named.
Margaret was nicknamed ‘the Dirty Duchess’, with her husband claiming she had had 88 lovers. The new BBC drama about the divorce is called A Very British Scandal and will be made by the team behind the corporation’s A Very English Scandal, about Jeremy Thorpe’s gay affair, which starred Hugh Grant as the ex-Liberal leader. While Miss Foy, 36, will play the duchess, Paul Bettany, 4 , known for his roles in films including Journey’s End, will play her husband Ian Campbell, Duke of Argyll.
Filming of the three-part series will take place later this year and it will be shown first on BBC1.