Antony Armstrong-Jones

Antony Armstrong-Jones, the dapper photographer who became the Earl of Snowdon after he married Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II, in 1960, and plunged into a life of privileges, parties, quarrels and infidelities that ended in divorce 18 years later, died on Friday January 13 2017at his home in London. He was 86. The Snowdon title has centuries-old royal associations, borne by Welsh princes and the House of Gwynedd before 1282. But it was given as a nod to his own Welsh antecedents. A month after the title was conferred, a son, David Albert Charles, Viscount Linley, was born on Nov. 3, 1961. A second child, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, was born on May 1, 1964. In 1976, they formally separated after a photograph of the princess with a younger man who had been her companion for several years generated a scandal. Divorce followed in 1978. Always the black sheep of her family, subject to more gossip than any member since King Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry an American who was divorced, the princess never remarried and died in 2002 after a series of strokes. Months after the divorce, Lord Snowdon married Lucy Mary Lindsay-Hogg, the former wife of the film director and baronet, Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Seven months later, their only child, Frances Armstrong-Jones, was born. The couple broke up in 2000 after it was disclosed that Lord Snowdon had fathered a son with Melanie Cable-Alexander, an editor. Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones was born in London on March 7, 1930, to Ronald and Anne Messel Armstrong-Jones. His father was a barrister and queen’s counsel, the highest rank of a trial lawyer, from which judges are usually selected. There were landed gentry among Antony’s ancestors. He had an older sister, Susan. His parents were divorced when he was 5, and he was raised by his father’s second wife, the former Carol Coombe, until that marriage ended in divorce. Ronald Armstrong-Jones then married Jennifer Unite, a flight attendant only two years older than Antony. The boy was sent to Sandroyd Preparatory School, and went on to Eton, where he was an indifferent student. At 16, he contracted polio. He spent six months in the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, where his only family visitor was his sister, and emerged with a withered left leg, one inch shorter than the other, and a slight lifelong limp, which he learned to disguise with a bouncy gait. At Jesus College, Cambridge, he studied architecture and was an enthusiastic photographer and rowing coxswain, but he failed his examinations and was expelled in 1951. He was apprenticed to a court photographer and established his own studio in the Pimlico district of London. His imaginative portraits of society figures, like lighthearted dowagers, appeared in Tatler. He became popular in fashionable circles. In 1956, he made a portrait of the Duke of Kent and soon became a court photographer, taking pictures of the royal family for birthdays and other occasions. His fashion and advertising shots appeared in Vogue. Becoming interested in theatrical set designs. He roamed London, taking pictures of children, the elderly and mentally ill people that were displayed in galleries and hailed by critics.