Brushes and bleach, a new doormat... is Dirty Duchess Claire cleaning up her act?
SHE’LL be getting mucky on TV screens as a scandal-hit aristocrat dubbed ‘the Dirty Duchess’ – but in real life, it appears that actress Claire Foy is the Queen of Clean.
The 37-year-old star was spotted carrying a bucket of cleaning products, including brushes and bleach and even a new doormat close to her home in North London last week.
Wearing a grey overcoat with joggers, trainers and a pink woolly hat, the star of The Crown, who plays the Duchess of Argyll in the forthcoming drama A Very British Scandal, was seen packing the supplies into a car.
While it is doubtful whether her off-duty outfit would pass muster in aristocratic circles, Ms Foy did betray a weakness for glamour by carrying a £2,000 Givenchy Mystic handbag and wearing a pair of designer sunglasses.
But judging by her shopping haul, it was equally clear that despite portraying the Queen in the first two series of Netflix’s Royal drama, the actress is not afraid of getting her hands dirty.
Four years after her final outing in The Crown, she will star as society beauty Margaret Campbell, who scandalised the Establishment when her diaries and sexually explicit Polaroids became public during a notorious 1963 divorce case.
The showpiece BBC1 three-part drama, which begins on Boxing Day, follows her fall from grace amid her divorce from Ian Campbell, the 11th Duke of Argyll, who was responsible for making public in court shocking evidence, including a photograph of the Duchess wearing just a string of pearls with a mystery man in her London flat.
The court hearing was also told that her suitors included Cabinet Ministers, Hollywood stars and Royals, earning her the nickname
‘the Dirty Duchess’. Granting the divorce, the judge said she ‘was a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men’.