In memoriam: Anthony Holden, royal chronicler who ruffled the palace

By Penelope Green

NEW YORK: Anthony Holden, a polymathic and prolific British author, journalist and poker player who found accidental fame as a royal biographer and critic of the monarchy, but who was happier writing books about Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier and Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, died on Oct. 7 at his home in London. He was 76. The cause was a brain tumour, his son Ben said.

Holden was writing the gossipy “Atticus” column — a frothy mix of politics and celebrity — for The Sunday Times in London when, in 1977, he was sent to cover Prince Charles’s visit to Canada to open the Calgary Stampede, a rodeo. As “Atticus,” he had written about Brigitte Bardot and Rudolph Nureyev, accompanied Margaret Thatcher to China and been whacked on the head with a rolled-up copy of Playboy magazine by Frank Sinatra (apparently in a gesture of affection, not press bashing). The prince was sort of a dud assignment, but Holden made the best of it, even though the most interesting thing Prince Charles said to him was: “Married, are you? Fun, is it?”

The column Holden wrote about the royal junket amused both Queen Elizabeth II and her son, now King Charles III, and Holden soon received a book deal to write a biography of Charles. Though he thought the subject was boring, the advance of 15,000 pounds was too large to turn down.

When “Prince Charles: A Biography” was published in 1979, it was mostly charitably reviewed, even by its subject. Prince Charles told Holden that he liked the fact that he’d depicted a life that “was not all wine and roses.”

Holden returned to his own life as a journalist, working as a Washington correspondent for The Observer, briefly as features editor for The Times of London and as a freelancer for other papers. Yet the royal beat dogged him.

News programs invariably called on him to comment on royal matters, American journalists sought him out in trying to understand that peculiar British institution, and publishing executives kept offering him royalty-themed book deals, for soft stuff like “Their Royal Highnesses: The Prince & Princess of Wales” (1981), “A Week in the Life of the Royal Family” (1983) and “Anthony Holden’s Royal Quiz” (1983).

Then, in the late 1980s, his publisher asked him to write a second biography of the prince, and what he delivered was a chilly picture of the marriage of Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales. In the book, titled simply “Charles” and published in 1988, Holden wrote that the prince “no longer understands her — nor even, it seems, much likes her,” and that the princess seemed bored with him. (The book was serialized in The Sunday Times.) Buckingham Palace denounced Holden in a statement, igniting a tabloid frenzy.

“A Distorted Portrait of the Prince,” read one headline, which quoted a royal aide as saying the book was “fiction from beginning to end.” A writer in The Express called Holden “the most reviled man in Britain.” And as Holden recalled in a 2021 memoir, “Based on a True Story: A Writer’s Life,” The Daily Mail ran a hit piece declaring that he had left his first wife, a “classy pianist,” for a “blonde American bimbo”; was living the high life in a mansion on the Thames; and had slandered the prince to pay off his gambling debts.