Lady Annabel Goldsmith did not mind having the most famous celebrity nightspot in London named after her: “A person might have a rose named after them, but seldom a nightclub. That’s pretty good,” she told the Observer in 2009. Not only good but lucrative.
The nightclub set up by her first husband, the businessman Mark Birley, on borrowed money in the summer of 1963 – the same week as the Profumo scandal broke – in the Berkeley Square basement of their friend John Aspinall’s notorious private casino, the Clermont Club, was eventually sold in 2007 for £90m.
By then she had long ceased going. Annabel’s had attracted celebrities such as, at various times, members of the royal family – even Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 – the Kennedys, Richard Nixon, Muhammad Ali and Frank Sinatra, though the real-life Annabel had failed to recognise Sinatra when he visited the club.
Annabel and Jimmy Goldsmith at David Frost’s garden party in central London, 1992. Photograph: Alan Davidson/Shutterstock
Goldsmith, who has died aged 91, was herself a celebrity, accessible to journalists and happy to explain about the men in her life at a time when talking openly about being a mistress was still vaguely scandalous. Having married Birley as a teenager in 1954, she began a relationship with the financier Sir James Goldsmith 10 years later, having discovered that her first husband was a serial adulterer – as, it turned out, was her second.
By the time they married in 1978, she had two children with him and would go on to have a third, to add to three with Birley. He then embarked on further affairs, and remarked: “If you marry your mistress, you create a vacancy.”
Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart was the second child of Robin, Viscount Castlereagh, heir to the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, and his wife Romaine Combe, whom his family regarded as distinctly socially inferior because she was the daughter of an only moderately wealthy Surrey brewer.
The Londonderry family did not lack for money, based on 50,000 acres of land and the ownership of coalmines in County Durham. They had several family homes, Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland, Wynyard Park near Stockton-on-Tees and another in Mayfair.
The viscount was briefly government minister for air at the time of his daughter’s birth, before being sacked for his pro-Nazi views, while her mother was a friend of the Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald. Their daughter, “Lady” as the child of a marquess, received a standard education for aristocratic young women of the time – Southover Manor, a private boarding school in Sussex, followed by a tutorial college in Oxford – and she was introduced at court as a debutante.
Annabel and Mark Birley in 1954. He named his nightclub Annabel’s. Photograph: Smith Archive/Alamy
Her mother contracted cancer and died when Annabel was 17, and her father, by then the 8th marquess, succumbed to alcoholism and died four years later. The year before his death, Annabel married Birley, the son of the society portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley. The couple had two sons, Rupert and Robin, followed by a daughter, India Jane.
She was soon aware of Birley’s compulsive infidelity: “He was a serial adulterer. Like a butterfly he had to seduce every woman,” she told a journalist later. The couple separated in 1972 and were divorced three years later. “Our breakup was because of Mark’s infidelities, not because I fell in love with Jimmy,” she explained to Vanity Fair magazine.
In 1970 Robin, at the age of 12, was severely mauled by a pregnant tigress at Howlett’s zoo in Kent, whose owner, the family friend Aspinall, had incautiously taken a group into her cage. He was left with disfiguring head and facial injuries and survived only after Aspinall managed to unclamp the animal’s jaws by thrusting his own arm into her mouth. Rupert disappeared in 1980, aged 30, after going swimming off a beach in Togo, west Africa, where he had business interests.
By the time of her divorce from Birley, Annabel had been in a relationship with James Goldsmith for 10 years: he was then married to Ginette Léry, his second wife. “Of course I minded the fact that he had another family very much indeed, but what could I do?” she said. “I had young children and in the end I just went along with it. And of course I loved him.”
She told the Times in 1987: “I can never understand the wives who really mind, the wives who set such store by fidelity. How extraordinary and how mad they are because surely if a man goes out and comes back, it’s not actually doing any harm.”
By the time of their marriage, he had another partner, the journalist Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, with whom he would have two children. In 1981 he decided to move to the US in the wake of settling a lengthy legal battle with Private Eye (which had accused him of complicity in the disappearance of Lord Lucan) and in pursuit of his business interests, but Annabel refused to go with him because of the children. Instead, he visited the family in their Queen Anne mansion, Ormeley Lodge, on the edge of Richmond Park, whenever he was passing through London.
Annabel Goldsmith, right, campaigning with her children Jemima, left, and Zac, in 2010. Photograph: Alan Davidson/Shutterstock
Her three children with James were Jemima, a writer and campaigner, who married the Pakistan cricketer and politician Imran Khan; Zac, who became a minister in the governments of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak; and Ben, a financier, environmentalist and campaigner. For a period in the 1990s, Diana, Princess of Wales, was a regular visitor, confiding in and growing close to her.
Goldsmith described herself as: “An incredible mother, rather a good mistress, but not a very good wife.”
She was a philanthropic donor to countryside and environmental charities and a patron of the Dogs’ Trust and supporter of the Battersea Dogs and Cats’ home. Her husband founded the Referendum party in 1994 to campaign against the European Union; after his death in 1997, she continued to give money to the Democracy Movement, an anti-EU campaigning body.
She wrote several volumes of memoirs – Annabel: An Unconventional Life (2004), Copper: A Dog’s Life (2006), about a mongrel who was one of her many dogs, and The Pelham Cottage Years (2009), about her time living with Birley in Chelsea.
Her granddaughter Iris died in an accident in 2019. Goldsmith is survived by five of her six children and 16 of her 17 grandchildren.
Annabel Goldsmith, socialite and charity patron, born 11 June 1934; died 18 October 2025
