Striking Irish actress Lisa Hogan is one of the few people in the world who can boast that they have walked away from a plane crash practically unscathed.
Now lucky Lisa, 35, has walked away from her marriage to prodigal playboy Baron Steven Bentinck - again seemingly unharmed by the experience.
The 6ft 2in mother-of-two is, I can reveal, no longer living as man and wife with Bentinck - nicknamed "Baron Bonkers" after his disastrous forays into the showbiz and publishing industries
in the 1970s. She has moved into a former B&B in Lymington, Hampshire, taking the couple's two young children with her.
Strangely, there has been little acrimony between the pair, and friends have not found it easy to tell that there has even been a split. One tells me: "If you didn't know, you wouldn't think anything was wrong because they always spent a lot of time apart anyway."
Lisa and Bentinck - the nephew of late steel magnate Baron Heini Thyssen - had previously divided their time between an apartment in Norris Castle on the Isle of Wight and the Baron’s family's fabulous Chalet Eugenia in the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Klosters.
"Funnily enough," says my source, "they are together in Switzerland at the moment with
the children and they are planning to spend holidays together in the future."
Adds the friend: "Steven will also come to England at weekends and, as nothing much has
changed in the amount of time they spend together, the children are not aware of any change.
"It has all been very civilised and amicable. Lisa still regards Steven as a good friend and an
excellent father."
Lisa, 35, was "discovered" by John Cleese in the early 1990s when she was struggling to get a second-hand-clothes business off the ground.
He subsequently employed her as a researcher, became a close friend and even gave her a role in Fierce Creatures, his follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda.
Despite reports to the contrary, they were never romantically involved and Lisa eventually fell for handsome Bentinck, 47, who had previously been married to Italian-born Princess Nora
Czartoryski.
But Bentinck and Lisa's recent circumstances were something of a come-down in the world from when they first met. Bentinck previously lived at
Moyns Park, Essex, the Elizabethan former home of Lord Ivar Mountbatten, but sold the house and its 414 acres for £6 million three years ago.
Explains another friend: "Steven lost a fortune in the otcom bubble and they had to rent out Chalet Eugenia for about £16,000 a week."
But Lisa, who now develops movie scripts, still counted herself one of the luckiest women alive after her near-death experience.
She was on her way to film at Pinewood Studios in 1996 when the Learjet she was travelling in
- chartered by Bentinck - overshot the runway at RAF Northolt and crashed onto the A40 in West London, colliding with a van. Amazingly, she
climbed out of the wreckage with just a cut on her leg.
Lady in the lake? Non!
The in-depth research into French lingerie undertaken by stunning writer Helena Frith Powell for her latest book, Two Lipsticks And A Lover, has astonished old friends.
One in particular - Lady Kilbracken - is amused because, during visits to the Kilbrackens' Georgian mansion in Ireland, Helena was renowned for wearing nothing at all on trips to the lakes within the grounds.
"Possessing neither swimwear nor inhibitions, she always swam in the nude," Sue says from her estate of 350 rolling acres in County Leitrim, where she lives with Lord Kilbracken.
"She arrived one summer ten years ago and stripped off for days on end. Locals still talk
about it."
Farmhands apparently drove their tractors at all
hours to get a glimpse of Helena's "perfect figure". "Never have we had so many offers of help with the haymaking," admits Lady Kilbracken, whose husband lists bird-watching
among his interests in Who's Who.
From her home in Languedoc, France, 35-year-old Helena tells me: "I had to dodge a gardener who kept mowing the lawn again and again while I swam."
She confesses: "I suppose it's because I'm half-Swedish that I can never go past a loch or lake without wanting to take my clothes off and jump in."
So does she still bathe au naturel?
"I bathe naked with my husband in our own swimming pool and anyone else's if they ask us," she says. "But our house is very remote and there are no farmhands to spy on us."
If the shoe fits, Tamara...
Her attempts to settle in Los Angeles earlier this year lasted just weeks, but Jimmy Choo shoe queen Tamara Mellon may now have reason to return. For Tamara, 37, has caught the eye of Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein - and not for the reasons you might expect.
Explains a friend: "Harvey thinks Tamara would be a fantastic film producer as she's been so successful in the shoe business." Weinstein, who
is dating aspiring actress Georgina Chapman, 29, told Tamara of his plans during a dinner at Origin in Covent Garden.
Sadly for Tinseltown's flagging fortunes, I'm told: "Tamara was very flattered, but she doesn't
have any immediate plans to re-create herself as a producer."
Old Master Young
Pretentious or what? Playwright Toby Young has, in the style of a Renaissance Old Master, taken on an apprentice. The hapless 'victim' is 28-year-old Gareth Sibson - himself an author - who got the job only because the other four applicants were glamorous women, a fact which did not go down well in the Young household.
Young, who penned political satire Who's The Daddy?, is paying Sibson a Third World wage for a four-day week. He tells me: "My wife insisted I go for the bloke."
PS What, I wonder, will Americans make of Prince Charles's gloomy complaint on US TV that "I'll be appreciated only after I've gone"? Says a former royal adviser: "He's got a Prince Albert complex about his achievements; he worries that, like Queen Victoria's consort, he is destined not to be understood until after his death."
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