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| MickChick |
Very sad to hear...
Ananova:
Princess Margaret has died after suffering a further stroke
Princess Margaret died peacefully in her sleep this morning, Buckingham Palace announced.
She suffered a further stroke yesterday afternoon.
In a statement the Palace said: "The Queen, with great sadness, has asked for the following announcement to be made immediately.
"Her beloved sister, Princess Margaret, died peacefully in her sleep this morning at 6.30am in the King Edward VII Hospital."
The statement continued: "Her children, Lord Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto, were at her side.
"She developed cardiac problems during the night and was taken from Kensington Palace to the King Edward VII Hospital at 2.30am.
"Lord Linley and Lady Sarah were with her and the Queen was kept fully informed throughout the night. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and other members of the Royal Family are being informed."
Princess Margaret, 71, suffered at least two previous strokes in recent years.
She was last seen in public before Christmas at Princess Alice, the Dowager Duchess of Gloucester's 100th birthday party.
Margaret was confined to a wheelchair and wore heavy dark glasses, her sight having been affected by a stroke.
The Queen yesterday left Sandringham, her Norfolk estate, and travelled to Windsor where she remained in touch with developments. The royal death will cast a shadow over the Queen's Golden Jubilee.
[Edited by MickChick] |
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| CS |
Margaret's island idyll
She had many love affairs but none outlived her passion for the paradise island of Mustique.
Princess Margaret: love affairs
However, like her romantic dalliances, Princess Margaret's flirtation with the Caribbean isle ended in tears.
The dream began in 1960 when Margaret was given a prize plot of land on the island as a wedding present by her former escort Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner, whose family had bought Mustique for £45,000 in the late-1950s.
The Princess recalled that Scottish millionaire landowner Tennant asked her: "Would you like a bit of my island or something I can wrap up and send you?"
She chose the 10 acres of real estate and had her first glimpse of the island during a honeymoon Caribbean cruise aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia.
Subsequently Margaret asked her husband Lord Snowdon's uncle, Oliver Messel, an architect and theatrical designer, to create a villa.
"I had always longed to build a house - with one's own ideas about cosy corners," she said.
"Oliver drew the house but I said to him that I was going to do the inside.
"I put up a portrait of the Queen for people from abroad to see it's an English house."
Named Les Jolies Eaux (Pretty Waters), the single-illa was the scene of exclusive - albeit sometimes decadent, exotic and outrageous - parties, overlooking tall palms, sandy coves and blue lagoons.
The Princess would play the piano, sing and dance the night away.
Mustique was Margaret's greatest pleasure and the remote Grenadines island soon became a playground for Royalty, rock stars and the simply rich.
February and March, cold and bleak back home in Britain, became Mustique months for Margaret who looked forward to her annual get-away.
After her divorce in 1978, it became a sun-splashed sanctuary and a love-nest to where she took her young beau Roddy Llewellyn.
Other guests included Rolling Stone Mick Jagger and his then wife Bianca who rented Les Jolies Eaux from the Princess. Mick later wooed Texan model Jerry Hall on Mustique and built his own Japanese-style house there.
Fellow rocker David Bowie also became a property owner on the island as land values rocketed and Lord Glenconner reaped the rich harvest of his Royal connection.
Margaret's photographer cousin Lord Lichfield became a neighbour and her nephew Prince Andrew brought his former porn-star girlfriend Koo Stark for a holiday in 1982.
Celebrities who rented the Princess's villa in later years included Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley, Nigel Havers and supermodel Claudia Schiffer.
In 1996, and in failing health, Margaret transferred the property to her only son Viscount Linley to avoid future death duties.
For a time, Lord Linley let the villa at a lucrative rent of £8,000 a week, mainly to wealthy Americans, but in 1998 he put the property up for sale.
The news devastated his mother, whose objections were overruled.
The house was originally on the market for around £2 million and eventually sold for more than £1.5 million to an American telecommunications tycoon.
The final heartbreak for Margaret came in 2000 when the new owner's bulldozers began tearing down her beloved Les Jolies Eaux to convert the colonial neo-Georgian villa into what the Princess's friends feared would be a vulgar cliff-top gin palace.
More: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/news/story.html?in_review_id=497698&in_review_text_id=459210 |
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CHAT ROOM aka THE FUN HOUSE] [
RESTROOMS]