Matriarch Lady Annabel Goldsmith dies aged 91

Lady Annabel Goldsmith, the renowned society beauty whose name was immortalised when her husband named a Mayfair nightclub after her, has died at the age of 91.

A major figure in the London of the swinging Sixties, Lady Annabel, who had six children and 14 grandchildren, was loved and revered as the great matriarch of the Goldsmith clan. ‘She was quite simply irreplaceable,’ her family said today, adding that she succumbed to ‘a very short illness’.

Only last month Lady Annabel, widow of billionaire financier James Goldsmith, attended her son Zac’s wedding in the Cotswolds. Described as the society wedding of the year, the former Conservative MP tied the knot with Hum Fleming, the great-niece of James Bond author Sir Ian Fleming.

Lady Annabel’s other children include journalist and film producer Jemima Goldsmith and environmentalist Ben Goldsmith.

A statement, released by her five living children to confirm her death, read: ‘It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who died peacefully in her sleep this morning at the age of 91. Robin, India Jane, Jemima, Zac and Ben.’

Ben Goldsmith told the Mail today: ‘We are bereft, not for her – because her life has been extraordinary and complete – but for us, because of the immense hole in our lives she leaves behind. I spoke to her every day for 45 years, she truly had my back and we loved each other very much. I will miss her terribly.’

Annabel’s nightclub was founded in 1963 by her first husband Mark Birley and was, for a time, the most feted in the world. ‘Everyone from the Kennedys to the Royal Family came, and I once found myself standing next to Frank Sinatra without realising it,’ Lady Annabel once recalled.

Lady Annabel was born in London in 1934 into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family as Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart.

She was the daughter of Robin Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, who would become the 8th Marquess of Londonderry, and Romaine Combe, who was the daughter of Major Boyce Combe, from Surrey. 

She took on the title of Lady Annabel at just 15 in 1949, after her father became Marquess following the death of her grandfather.

Her mother died of cancer two years later, and tragically her father soon followed in 1955.

Such was her social standing, even as a young woman, that Queen Elizabeth II herself attended her ‘coming-out’ ball in 1952.

Although Lady Annabel’s life was privileged, it was also touched with tragedy. Her first son Rupert died in 1986 off the coast of Togo, West Africa when he was 30. 

It was, she said, the ‘worst thing that has happened to me’ adding: ‘There really is nothing worse than losing a child – and there is something special about your first-born. Because I was so young when Rupert was born … we were more like good friends than mother and son. It was worse than my parents dying, but I said to myself: ‘I have six children. I’ve lost one. I have to be strong for the rest of them’.’

Rupert, his brother Robin and sister India Jane were all born to Lady Annabel during her 21-year marriage to her first husband, Mark Birley.

She was then first the mistress and later the wife of Sir James, one of Europe’s most flamboyant industrialists who set up the Referendum Party. 

Lady Annabel, an author, was herself the founder of the Democracy Movement, a Eurosceptic political advocacy group. 

As a published author, she offered candid glimpses into her life in British high society. Annabel: An Unconventional Life (2004), and her follow-up, No Invitation Required: The Pelham Cottage Years (2009), were noted for their wit and warmth.

She had another three children with Goldsmith, and stayed with him when he famously said: ‘If you marry your mistress, you create a vacancy.’

Lady Annabel, the younger of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry’s two daughters – they also had a younger brother – once described herself as ‘an incredible mother, rather a good mistress, but not a very good wife’.

Annabel’s opened on June 4 1963 and was run by Birley for more than 40 years. During the 1960s, Lady Annabel was a constant presence at Annabel’s, which she called her ‘second home’.

One of the grandest clubs of the sixties and seventies, it was where she entertained guests ranging from Ted and Robert F. Kennedy to Frank Sinatra, Prince Charles, Richard Nixon, and Muhammad Ali. 

‘I used to be there every night, even when I had three small children to take to school the next day,’ she once said.

‘A person might have a rose named after them, but seldom a nightclub. That’s pretty good. I was blasé about it at the time when Mark told me that’s what he was calling his club. It’s a nice gesture and people still ask if I’m the Annabel from Annabel’s.

She added: ‘As the years went on I became rather proud of it. He [Birley] made it into the most extraordinarily beautiful place. My favourite spot was in the loos with my beloved Mabel, who looked after them. They were incredibly chic, with proper basins and meticulously kept.

‘I used to get there early to gossip; nothing happened there that Mabel didn’t know about. And she was a stickler for hand washing. She’d always tell me who ‘had’ and who ‘hadn’t’.’

Her second son Robin was left disfigured as a child after he was mauled by a tiger in a private zoo. Having let him go near the pregnant tigress, Lady Annabel said: ‘It was my own fault. I was, am, angry with myself.’

The Birleys separated in 1972 and divorced in 1975 after the birth of her second child with James Goldsmith. ‘Our breakup was because of Mark’s infidelities, not because I fell in love with Jimmy,’ Lady Annabel recalled.

Revealing that Birley had numerous other girlfriends from the beginning of their relationship, she added: ‘I think he was absolutely incapable of being faithful. He was a serial adulterer. Like a butterfly, he had to seduce every woman.’

Despite their divorce, the two remained best friends and soulmates, talking to each other every day and holidaying together until Birley’s death in August 2007. Birley said they were ‘the true loves of each other’s lives’.

In 1964, she embarked on a decade-long extramarital affair with Sir James Goldsmith, a member of the Goldsmith banking dynasty. Though both she and Goldsmith, who was then married to his second wife Ginette Lery, believed that the affair would be a passing fling, it soon gained her notoriety in London’s gossip columns.

She once said: ‘Jimmy was married when I met him. And although for many years he wasn’t unfaithful to me, I should’ve known that eventually he would be. Perhaps in my heart I knew it would happen. 

‘Of course I minded the fact that he had another family very much indeed. But what could I do? I had young children and in the end I just went along with it. And of course I loved him.’

She married Sir James in 1978, and they had three children, Jemima, Zac and Ben. Sir James died of pancreatic cancer in 1997.

Annabel’s remains a members-only venue in Berkeley Square that even the late Queen Elizabeth visited in 2003. 

Lady Annabel’s children followed in her footsteps in taking up prominent roles in English society.

Her son Zac was recently made a member of the House of Lords after serving as a prominent Conservative politician and former MP for Richmond Park.

He held government roles including as a Cabinet minister and also ran in the London mayoral contest in 2016.

Her daughter Jemima, now Jemima Khan, is a prominent TV and film producer and journalist, who notably contributed to the fifth series of the hit Netflix show The Crown. 

But tragedy struck the family with the sudden death of her granddaughter, Iris Goldsmith, in 2019 at just 15 years old.

The daughter of Ben Goldsmith and Kate Rothschild, Iris passed away after an accident on the family farm when the all-terrain vehicle she was driving overturned.