Wed at last, the heiress no man could resist: Charles was besotted. She's dated everyone from Rod Stewart to Jack Nicholson. Now, at 58, Sabrina Guinness is finally marrying - to a man with his own very racy past
- Sabrina Guinness is engaged to playwright Sir Tom Stoppard
- Was previously seen as the most eligible woman in Britain
- Believed to have timed engagement to coincide with 87th birthday of Sabrina's mother, Pauline Guinness
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The question from inquisitive reporters was straightforward enough — could Pauline Guinness confirm the whereabouts of her daughter Sabrina. With twinkling eyes, she gave her reply: ‘She’s you-know-where with you-know-who.’
That weekend in 1979, the beautiful Sabrina Guinness, 24, was at Balmoral with a bachelor Prince Charles, together with the Queen and Philip. It was common knowledge that the bride-hunting prince, then 31, was besotted with her.
Ash-blonde Sabrina was the girl with everything — staggeringly pretty, endlessly long legs, a bright mind and a sunny disposition, not to mention a Guinness heiress through her father, on the banking side of the billionaire brewery family. One male admirer summed her up as ‘a cross between Goldilocks and Alice in Wonderland’.
Sabrina Guinness and playwright Tom Stoppard have announced they are engaged
But after nine heady months together, Charles suddenly, though reluctantly, dropped her, and everyone knew why. Unlike Diana, who was only 19 and had kept herself ‘tidy’ when she got engaged to the prince two years later, Sabrina had lived a little, and the Queen knew it.
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ShareShe’d been seen with some famous escorts, from pop stars Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger to Dai ‘Seducer of the Valleys’ Llewellyn and Tory politician Jonathan Aitken. She’d even spent time with Hollywood’s lascivious Jack Nicholson — as a Montessori-trained nursery teacher she worked for a year in Los Angeles looking after actor Ryan O’Neal’s precocious actress daughter, Tatum. For a future Queen, that libidinous roll-call would always have been a problem.
Even post-Charles she was still, arguably, the most eligible woman in Britain. Astonishingly, that is how she has remained for 34 years until last week, just a month short of her 59th birthday, when it emerged that at last she is to marry.
The question is why it’s taken all these years for Sabrina Guinness to have a diamond engagement ring on her finger for the first time in her life, placed there by that twice-divorced Lothario, playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, O.M., who is 76.
They have been together for more than a year, and are believed to have timed their engagement to coincide with the 87th birthday of Sabrina’s mother, now a widow living in Hampshire.
For Mrs Guinness, a great beauty herself in the Fifties, the betrothal of the last of her five children is her greatest wish.
The 'Charles's ex' label has always stuck to Sabrina Guinness - years after he called off their nine month relationship
‘She’s really delighted,’ says her son-in-law Keith Payne, a sculptor and painter who lives in Cork, Ireland, with Sabrina’s twin sister Miranda. ‘And you can imagine how Miranda feels — she and Sabrina have an almost psychic link.’
A long time ago the twin sisters shared a flat in London’s Kensington which they gloomily nicknamed ‘The Shelf’. They were 35 when Miranda married Payne, at that time a set designer for the Rolling Stones. It had been 11 years since Sabrina had captured the heart of the Prince of Wales, but as Miranda settled down in a happy married life, Sabrina remained single.
There certainly wasn’t a shortage of men. She was seen out (again) with Jagger, and dated actor Michael Douglas, who was reported as saying: ‘I love Sabrina.’
Singer Bryan Ferry came and went, as did Morgan Mason, politician son of the actor James Mason.
Her male friends were an eclectic bunch. On Millennium Eve, she was the partner of Labour politician Peter Mandelson at the Dome to join the Queen and the Blairs et al.
The pair, pictured in 1979, dated for about nine months and Princess Margaret said their relationship was 'serious'
One friend says: ‘Sabrina has never displayed any real need to get married or desire to do so. She’s always been so very independent, with a full life, on the invitation list of practically everyone who matters in London, and she’s never been short of male admirers. None of her boyfriends ever looked like serious propositions.
‘I suppose the older she got, the more particular she became.’
She and Prince Charles had been very close, meeting secretly as well as going to polo and the theatre. She pointedly took fly-fishing lessons (one of Charles’s favourite hobbies), and Princess Margaret described the relationship as ‘serious’.
Things had not always gone smoothly in royal company, however. When Sabrina perched in a particular chair at Balmoral, the Queen allegedly snapped: ‘Don’t sit there, it’s Queen Mary’s chair.’
At the time, she fended off marriage talk by saying: ‘I love being with him, but please don’t try to marry us off — he’s not ready for marriage yet.’
But the ‘Charles’s ex’ label has always stuck to her. And there can be little doubt that the worldwide attention she attracted would have put off many potential suitors.
Sabrina never saw her life like that. ‘When I look around at the men of my era who aren’t married or settled down, they all seem rather hopeless,’ she said once.
Well, a woman of resolute independence she may be, but that sounded rather like a women who feared she had missed the boat.
Sabrina Guinness has been linked to number of high profile men, including Mick Jagger
Her ideal man, she said, is ‘kind and sensitive with a great sense of humour, of course, really interested in whatever he’s doing and dedicated to it, ambitious and not at all complacent. He mustn’t just slot in.’
Step forward Tom Stoppard, Czech-born former refugee and acknowledged as Britain’s greatest living playwright. He is certainly dedicated to his work and very definitely a figure who doesn’t just ‘slot in’.
Stoppard is a writer whose works have often explored the irresistible force of sexual attraction. And this distinguished man of letters — whom the Queen invited to join the nation’s most exclusive club of 24, the Order of Merit, in 2000 — has a colourful romantic career that has generated many headlines.
Which is perhaps why Stoppard, a former local newspaper reporter, penned an amusing exchange in his play Night And Day, which has the distinction of being quoted by Lord Justice Leveson during his inquiry into the culture and practices of the Press. As Leveson related, one character says: ‘No matter how imperfect things are, if you’ve got a free Press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.’
Sabrina Guinness, who was also once linked to Paul McCartney, was once described as a cross between Goldilocks and Alice In Wonderland
To which another character replies: ‘I’m with you on the free Press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.’
Stoppard’s first marriage in 1965 to a nurse, Jose, with whom he had two sons, was followed two years later by his first stage triumph, Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead at the National Theatre.
(When Stoppard was asked on TV what the play was about, he replied: ‘It’s about to make me rich.’)
Jose’s later nervous breakdown is widely believed to have been linked to her inability to keep up with her husband’s soaring celebrity.
He divorced her in 1972 to marry Dr Miriam Stern (an agony aunt and broadcaster), who was pregnant with the first of their two sons.
Ten years after marrying Miriam, Stoppard wrote The Real Thing, a play about a middle-aged playwright who leaves his wife for an actress called Annie whom he finds irresistible.
Though he dedicated the play to Miriam, he later left her for the actress who played Annie, Felicity Kendal.
Was life imitating art, or vice-versa? Petite one-time ‘Rear of the Year’, Ms Kendal was famous for the television sitcom The Good Life, in which she played kittenish Barbara Good with the late Richard Briers as her on-screen husband, Tom.
In real life, as she told the Mail earlier this year: ‘I always did have affairs when I wanted. It’s just how you are at the moment.’
But it wasn’t until Stoppard cast her in another of his plays, and her own second marriage — to theatre director Michael Rudman — had broken up, that she and Stoppard began their affair.
It was 1990 and Miriam’s distress was so acute she lightened her dark hair, possibly in a subconscious attempt to imitate her rival. But two years later, after 20 years of marriage, they were divorced.
A year later, Ms Kendal was again starring in a new play by her lover, Arcadia. A key theme is the random nature of sexual attraction. Many saw it as inspired by Stoppard’s own rather reckless private life.
But he and Ms Kendal didn’t marry, and parted in 1998, a year after Stoppard was knighted.
Sir Tom was previously married to first wife Jose and then Dr Miriam Stoppard, whom he left for Felicity Kendal
Now, however he is to remarry.
‘It’s all a bit of a blur for her, but she loves having the ring on her finger,’ says a friend of Sabrina. ‘She’s been known as “Charles’s ex” for 34 years and now she wants to be known as Tom Stoppard’s wife.’
They plan to live in Dorset, where Stoppard can finish a novel as well as a stage treatment of his Oscar-winning film script Shakespeare In Love. But what of the other characters with major roles in their lives?
Jose, his first wife, died ten years ago. Dr Miriam Stoppard, 76, has been happily married for the past 16 years to Sir Christopher Hogg, former chairman, among others, of chemical giant GlaxoSmithKline. Her son, Ed, with Stoppard is an actor.
Felicity Kendal, 67, is back with ex-husband Michael Rudman, from whom she was divorced in 1994.
And, of course, there’s Prince Charles. The synopsis is all there. Ex-love of the heir to the world’s most glamorous throne loses him thanks to a combination of protocol and tradition, and avoids marriage for 34 years — before marrying a distinguished author whom she knows has a dangerously poor record as a husband.
Someone should write it, shouldn’t they, Sir Tom?
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