Heiress

Marianne Smyth, an American woman who conned a reality producer and allegedly several other figures in and around Hollywood between 2013 and 2017, has been arrested in Maine as Northern Ireland seeks to extradite her to face charges. Smyth — whose colorful theft from American Ninja Warrior and Shark Tank producer Johnathan Walton as she claimed to be an Irish “heiress” was the subject of a 2020 story in The Hollywood Reporter — was arrested in the town of Bingham on February 23. Smyth stands accused of…

Film-makers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy have a restless creativity and alertness to ideas which continues to be uniquely valuable. Now they have made a vivid, intense, true-crime drama about the inner life of the late Rose Dugdale, the wealthy English heiress and debutante who was radicalised at Oxford, joined the IRA and in the early 70s was involved in an art theft from a stately home in the Irish republic – and also helped drop homemade bombs from a stolen helicopter on to a police station.Baltimore should really…

“I woke up one day and realized that, just by virtue of being born lucky, I had so much more than everyone else,” says Abigail Disney. “And I don’t think I’ve slept well since I figured that out.” Disney, the granddaughter of The Walt Disney Company co-founder Roy O. Disney, has used her considerable means to make the world a better place since the ‘90s, backing a string of non-profits and producing documentaries that shine a light on societal injustices. These have included Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about the…

“Bling Empire” star Anna Shay has died unexpectedly. The 62-year-old reality TV star suffered a stroke on Monday. A Netflix representative confirmed Shay’s death to The Times. “It saddens our hearts to announce that Anna Shay, a loving mother, grandmother, charismatic star, and our brightest ray of sunshine, has passed away at the early age of 62 from a stroke,” her family told The Times in a statement. “Anna taught us many life lessons on how not to take life too seriously and to enjoy the finer things. Her impact on…

The latest chapter in Brad Pitt’s real estate wheeling and dealing is coming to a close with a report that the actor has engaged in a rich people’s version of a “Trading Spaces”-style home swap with Getty Oil heiress Aileen Getty. Pitt has purchased Getty’s three-bedroom, midcentury-modern home in Los Feliz for $5.5 million, after she bought his $33 million estate in the same Los Angeles neighborhood, the website Dirt reported this week. For Pitt, buying Getty’s elegantly sleek, 2,000-square-foot home is his version of…

Sarah WatlingVintage, £20, pp384The most famous literary chroniclers of the Spanish civil war may have been Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, but, as Sarah Watling demonstrates in her fascinating and comprehensive study, that ignores the far less self-aggrandising contributions of a group of brilliant women who included everyone from the poet and activist Nancy Cunard to the journalist (and wife of Hemingway) Martha Gellhorn. Watling’s protagonists are flawed but brave, battling fascism with guts and determination –…

As the reclusive billionaire James Leprino looked on Tuesday, one of his nieces told Denver jurors that in 2014 she was “shocked” when Leprino accused his own brother of cheating him and then cut that brother out of the family cheese business. “The door is shut to you and your sisters doing anything in this building,” James Leprino, the CEO of Leprino Foods, told his niece Nancy Leprino in 2014, she testified. Nancy Leprino’s voice shook as she read aloud from a letter she wrote to her uncle after that remark, asking that…

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 20: Abigail Disney speaks at Firehouse DCTV's Cinema For Documentary Film Ribbon Cutting Ceremony on September 20, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Santiago Felipe/Getty Images)Santiago Felipe | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty ImagesAbigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney and shareholder in the media giant, went viral back in 2019 when she criticized former CEO Bob Iger's $66 million compensation package. Ever since, the Disney heiress — who is a documentary filmmaker and social…