Antony Armstrong-Jones, Photographer and Earl of Snowdon, Dies at 86 (Published 2017) (2024)

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 at his home in London. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by Buckingham Palace.

Tony, as his friends called him, flouted conventions, flunked out of Cambridge and used his London studio for portrait sittings and parties. He was a talented photographer whose pictures of royalty and world celebrities were widely published and hang in museums and national galleries.

He was also an ambitious, charming womanizer who was reported to have fathered two children out of wedlock, including one while courting Princess Margaret. He took her official portrait in 1958, and they connected again at a dinner party and began a secret affair.

“For Tony, it was all overwhelming,” Anne de Courcy wrote in “Snowdon: The Biography” (2008). “He was used to pretty girls, from unsophisticated debutantes to models and actresses of varying degrees of experience, and he was aware of the effect his well-honed sexual expertise had on women. But Margaret was something different. She was gilded with the mysterious, mythic aura of royalty.”

It was not an auspicious beginning. She was heartbroken, having been in love for years with a World War II flying ace, Group Capt. Peter Townsend, 16 years her elder and the divorced father of two. The royal family, the government and the Church of England had forbidden a marriage. And not long after she learned the captain would marry another woman, the princess accepted Mr. Armstrong-Jones’s proposal.

On May 6, 1960, the 30-year-old commoner and the 29-year-old younger daughter of King George VI, who died in 1952, and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, were married by the archbishop of Canterbury in a regal ceremony before 2,000 guests in Westminster Abbey and a global television audience of 300 million. As if in a fairy tale, they rode in a glass coach to Buckingham Palace, cheered by vast, ecstatic crowds.