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’.
Ceawlin Thynn, Viscount Weymouth, and Viscountess Emma WeymouthDavid M. Benett/Getty Images
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.
