Not many people can boast of such a rich existence as the one enjoyed by the Dowager Marchioness of Bath. A model, actress, journalist, writer, war correspondent and keeper of Longleat estate, by the time of her death at 78, the aristocrat was well and truly in a position to claim she had ‘lived life to the full’.
Hungarian-born Anna Thynn enjoyed a ‘bohemian childhood’ before embarking on an acting career in 1960s Paris during which she adopted the stage name Anna Gaël. It was here, at the age of 15, that she would meet her future husband and one of the English aristocracy's most renowned eccentrics, the Marquess of Bath, who she married in 1969.
The story goes that while seated next to her in a seedy Parisian cinema, the then 26-year-old art student, Alexander Thynne (later the Marquess of Bath), invited the young actress for a coffee. After persuading the teenager to return to his studio for a ‘nude photoshoot’, the pair later escaped the French capital to travel around South Africa together in Thynne's Jaguar.
The couple enjoyed an unconventional marriage, apparently ‘meeting for meals’ in a joint dining room. They came to an arrangement whereby Anna spent most of her time in Paris, leaving her husband free to ‘follow his eccentric pursuits’. Months after their wedding she gave birth to their first child, Lenka, a former model who later became a television researcher. In 1974 she produced Longleat's heir, Ceawlin Thynn (named after a Dark Ages King of Wessex), the now 7th Marquess of Bath.
The children's mother was largely absent from their childhood, visiting them on occasion from France. She told The New York Times in 1972 that she'd received a deal of criticism for her parenting style, defending herself by saying: ‘I couldn’t sacrifice my life for anybody. I would be bitter and unbearable to be with’.
The marchioness famously turned a blind eye to her husband's extra-marital affairs which earned him the nickname ‘Loins of Longleat’; Thynne became famous for having 70 or more mistresses, which he housed at his 16th-century pile.
The marquess boasted of having slept with hundreds of women, known as the 'wifelets of Bath', preserving them in papier-mâché portraits that hung ‘in order of conquest’ on a spiral staircase at the property. Thynne also famously covered a wing of the house in ‘erotic murals' which caused a rift between him and his son, after Ceawlin tried to remove a section of them in 2014. When Anna took a journalist on a tour of the property in 2015, she reportedly passed her husband’s artwork ‘without batting an eyelid’.
The ‘wifelets’, who apparently argued over ‘whose turn it was to sleep with him [the Marquess]’, lived under strict conditions. According to the Telegraph, the aristocrat refused to pay for their train tickets or taxi fares when they came down from London and served the women boxed wine and canned food at dinner parties. In his will, he ‘snubbed them completely’, leaving everything he owned to Anna and the children. Anna is said to have evicted the last of the ‘wifelets’ from the 10,000 acre estate (which is now known for its wildlife park) following her husband's death in 2020.
In 2020, after his father's death, Ceawlin described his parent's relationship as 'never quite as easy and harmonious as an “open marriage”, but that's the general gist'. He went on to add that his mother had ‘found being the Lady of Longleat fun for seven months and then realised it was not that great’. Although Thynne committed adultery on his wife on numerous occasions, he was apparently ‘devoted to her’, once describing the former French film star as 'the sexiest actress of all time'.
Anna's life started as it meant to go on, like something out of the pages of a novel. Born in Budapest in 1943, to a mathematician and poet, at the age of six she was smuggled on a false passport out of Hungary to France, to live with her mother.
Anna would go on to star in a number of Hungarian, German, Italian and French films including Via Macau (1966), Zeta One aka The Love Factor (1969), and Take Me, Love Me (1970), rising to global fame for her portrayal as Isabelle in erotic lesbian drama Therese and Isabelle (1968).
Throughout her life, Anna was insistent that nothing she did was pornographic, claiming to have turned down ‘racier offers’. She said: ‘No, I never made a blue movie in my life. I did undress, but it was necessary. I undressed to the waist.' Although she was featured partially nude in Penthouse magazine in 1970, she later threatened legal action against any newspaper that republished the pictures, clarifying that ‘times had changed and we aren’t there anymore’.
According to the Times, her ‘career received a boost’ when she wed Gilbert Pineau, a French director, in 1963. Despite her marriage, Anna kept in touch with Thynne (who later legally removed the ‘e’ from the end of his surname so that it would rhyme with ‘pin’ not ‘pine’) throughout her twenties. In 1969, after her marriage to Pineau was deteriorating, Thynne asked Anna to marry him, in the hope that she might produce an heir to his Wiltshire estate; ‘I broached the idea of a son and asked did she want to be the mother,’ he told People magazine in 1976.
The pair wed when Anna was three months pregnant at a registry office in London, in the company of witnesses (one of whom Anna had never met), which they followed with a pizza lunch. Later Anna recalled, ‘I don’t want to make it sound dull, because it wasn’t. To me it was awfully romantic’.
Anna was clearly easily bored; after giving up acting, she reinvented herself as a journalist, writing for the Times and Le Point magazine; she also published two books in her life. In 1971 she went to Vietnam to live with the army, sleeping on their floors; she was once caught by an air raid in Cambodia, where she found herself stuck in a hole for four days.
After her son proposed to Emma McQuiston (now Marchioness of Bath), who is half Nigerian, Anna made her disapproval of the match well known, refusing to attend the wedding in 2013.
The Dowager Marchioness of Bath is now survived by her son and daughter. She died of undisclosed causes on 17 September, 2022.
