Farewell to Beaulieu’s Elvis-loving aristocrat

SHE married the greatest aristocratic showman — and proved she could emulate his exuberance, never more dazzlingly than when, dressed in a white rhinestone-encrusted jump suit, she danced the night away with Elvis lookalikes (right).

But when the pace became too much for Fiona, second wife of the late Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, she sought sanctuary in a flat far from Palace House, her husband’s ancestral seat, and its 8,500-acre Hampshire estate — causing her to be playfully described as ‘the only woman who goes to London to get away from it all’.

It was there that she died peacefully on Sunday, aged 79, after a short illness. ‘She was surrounded by her close family,’ an estate spokesman tells me, explaining that included her son Jonathan and his wife Nathalie, and their daughter Akina, and her stepchildren, Mary and Ralph, who succeeded his father as the 4th Lord Montagu in 2015.

She met Edward Montagu while working as a film production assistant and they married in 1974, only months after his divorce from his first wife, Belinda, whom he had married in 1958. Four years before that first wedding, he had been jailed for a year for ‘consensual homosexual offences’ with an RAF serviceman. The case became a cause celebre which helped lead to a change in the law. Life with Lord Montagu at Palace House was never conventional. Once, recalled Fiona, in her bedroom she found ‘a little girl, sitting at my dressing table, brushing her hair. That’s when I decided that my bedroom should be out of bounds to visitors’.

A portrait depicted the peer with both wives, to whom he jointly dedicated his memoirs. Fiona became the first global ambassador for the Club of Budapest, an association seeking a more peaceful world with devotees from the Dalai Lama to Sharon Stone, while at home she dedicated herself to the Countryside Education Trust.

‘She brought light into every room,’ chief executive, Jane Cooper, tells me. ‘She was so good at engaging people.’ Including, it transpires, ‘a millionaire of her acquaintance’. Meeting him on a beach ‘by chance’ she asked for, and got, a donation to the trust.