![]() ![]() Jeremy Fry had to step down from his role as Armstrong-Jones’s best man at his wedding to Princess Margaret after the press discovered he had been arrested in 1952 for “a minor homosexual offense.” (The reason given in the press at the time, according to de Courcy, was a recurrence of jaundice.) And Camilla Fry, as depicted in The Crown, gave birth to a daughter, Polly, in May 1960, just weeks after Armstrong-Jones married Princess Margaret. Armstrong-Jones was suspected, even by Princess Margaret, of having homosexual leanings “I enjoyed his company very much, but I didn’t take a lot of notice of him because I thought he was queer,” she later told her biographer Christopher Warwick, as recounted in de Courcy’s book. The two were among Armstrong-Jones’s closest friends, though the existence of a romantic relationship between all three of them is difficult to prove. The most vividly depicted relationship on the show, and the one that would cause scandal even today, is the one with married couple Jeremy and Camilla Fry. After he began seeing Margaret, he definitely remained involved with the actress and dancer Jacqui Chan-depicted in an unusually graphic sex scene in The Crown’s seventh episode-whom de Courcy describes as “Tony’s first real love.” As Michael Adeane and Tommy Lascelles inform the Queen on The Crown when she begins to have doubts about her sister’s relationship, Armstrong-Jones was also involved with Gina Ward at the same time as Princess Margaret, as late as the summer of 1959-though the third woman mentioned on The Crown, his secretary, Robin Banks, is said by de Courcy to have been in love with someone else. As with many personal relationships, not everything about Armstrong-Jones’s personal life is on the record. Vanessa Kirby’s recreation of the portrait, though, remains stunning. The photograph on The Crown is a faithful recreation of one of the most famous portraits of Princess Margaret, but there’s a catch: the real one was taken in 1967, when Armstrong-Jones and Margaret were already married and known as the Lord and Countess of Snowdon. The fourth episode of The Crown’s second season ends with a stunning image of Princess Margaret, a portrait taken by Armstrong-Jones in which she appears to be naked, and which she, in a fit of rebelliousness, sent to The Times of London to be splashed across the country. The result, however, was the same: Princess Margaret was unforgiving, and decided she could do better. It also happened a year before Margaret and Armstrong-Jones began seeing each other in 1958. In real life, Wallace was in fact one of Margaret’s “favored escorts,” as described by de Courcy in a 2002 piece for The Telegraph, Andrew Alderson wrote that Margaret decided to marry Wallace because it was better to marry “somebody one at least liked.” Their engagement ended not with the drunken duel depicted on The Crown, but with a brief affair he had on a trip to the Bahamas. When Margaret first rejoins the action in The Crown’s second season, having essentially sat out the first three episodes, she’s a stone-faced guest at a wedding, still single and telling her friend Billy Wallace, “No one wants to take me on, apparently.” He then pulls out a spur-of-the-moment proposal, arguing that as her “old faithful” he would be a sensible, if not entirely romantic, husband. For more on the third season of The Crown, listen below to one of three special episodes of the Still Watching podcast:īut first, Billy Wallace. Below, a look at the true story of Margaret and Snowdon, and how it matches up with what happens on The Crown.Īnd for a much more comprehensive recounting of their relationship, read this excerpt from Anne de Courcy’s 2008 book Snowdon: The Biography, which will be cited extensively below. And The Crown’s third season tracks the implosion of this marriage with new actors- Helena Bonham Carter and Ben Daniels-playing princess and photographer. Their romance and marriage is the center of two of the most daring episodes of The Crown’s second season, which draw from the many things that are known about their explosive relationship-and infers some of the most dramatic details about what nobody but Margaret and Snowdon can know for sure. The Crown’s second season charted the intense relationship between Princess Margaret (played by Vanessa Kirby) and Antony Armstrong-Jones ( Matthew Goode), the photographer who became Lord Snowdon when he married Margaret in 1960. ![]()
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