Leslie Marr
Landscape artist, F1 racing driver and reluctant baronet
LESLIE MARR, who has died aged 98, was a landscape artist and also a composer, poet, potter, photographer, film-maker and Formula One racing driver.
Leslie Lynn Marr was born in Durham on August 14 1922, the only child of Colonel John Marr and Amelia, née Thompson. His grandfather, Sir James Marr, a Sunderland shipbuilder, had been created a baronet in 1919, and when he was 10 Leslie inherited the baronetcy, his father having died of pneumonia in 1918.
But he never used the title and one of his first acts on reaching his maturity was to give away most of the fortune he had inherited – initially supporting the Henry Doubleday Research Trust, a charity dedicated to researching and promoting organic gardening, farming and food, and latterly Glasgow Children’s Hospital.
From Shrewsbury School he read Engineering at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and served as a radar officer in the RAF towards the end of the war. His passion for painting developed during a posting to Palestine, where he made his own canvases from kitbags glued to plywood.
After demob, he attended Heatherley’s Art School in Pimlico before studying under David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic and, in 1948, marrying Bomberg’s stepdaughter, Dinora Mendelson.
He became part of the Borough Group of Bomberg disciples – including Dennis Creffield and Miles Peter Richmond – which broke up acrimoniously in 1950, leaving Marr with a lifelong mistrust of group activities.
His marriage ended more amicably in 1956, a year before Bomberg’s death, though he supported his tutor – who was “exasperatingly impractical, so that one kept having to get him out of awful messes” – to the last.
A painting trip to Cyprus with the Bomberg family in 1948 set him on a path of exotic travels as a landscape artist. He also turned his roving spirit to motor racing – driving his own Connaught in two British F1 Grands Prix.
Competing against the likes of Stirling Moss and Fangio, he finished 13th in 1954 but was forced to retire from the race in 1955. He also won the 1955 Cornwall MRC F1 Race and came fourth in the 1956 New Zealand Grand Prix. A photograph on the wall of his studio showed his Connaught leading the Mercedes of Moss and Fangio into a bend. If anyone inquired, he would admit: “It wasn’t the same lap.”
Marr appeared in the 1954 movie Mask of Dust – playing himself and acting as stunt-driver for Richard Conte, though he was not allowed to drive any faster than 50mph so that the camera car could keep up. He also made a documentary about reindeer migration in Norway.
Living in rural Norfolk from 1969, save for six years on the Isle of Arran, Marr created towering drawings of local churches and flower pieces exploding in colourful oils like fireworks; but his heart lay in wilder landscapes and he continued to travel widely in Britain, the Mediterranean and New Zealand.
His pictures were shown at the Piano Nobile gallery in London and collected by connoisseurs including the architect Colin St John Wilson and Terry Jones of Monty Python.
At 80, after the end of a second marriage to Lynn Moynihan, he married the actress Maureen Dormer and enjoyed two decades of great happiness, still travelling in his mind when finally confined to bed.
She survives him with a daughter from his second marriage. Another daughter predeceased him.
Leslie Marr, born August 14 1922, died May 4 2021