Harold Acton

Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton KBE (5 July 1904 - 27 February 1994) was a British writer, scholar and dilettante who is probably most famous for being believed, incorrectly, to have inspired the character of "Anthony Blanche" in Evelyn Waugh's novel "Brideshead Revisited" (1945). Waugh himself wrote, "The characters in my novels often wrongly identified with Harold Acton were to a great extent drawn from Brian Howard".

Life

Acton was born into a prominent Anglo-Italian family. He claimed that his great-great-grandfather was Commodore Sir John Acton, who was prime minister of Naples under Ferdinand IV, and grandfather of the Roman Catholic historian John Acton. However, the basis of this has been disputed. [James Lord, "Some Remarkable Men"]

His father was the art collector Arthur Acton, his mother Hortense Mitchell, heiress to a prominent Chicago banking family. The Mitchell fortune allowed Arthur to buy the remarkable Villa La Pietra on the hills of Florence, where Harold lived all his life [Green, p. 118-25, "Sunday Times" magazine] . The only modern furniture in the villa was in the nurseries, and that was disposed of when the children got older.

Unabashedly gay, Acton entered Christ Church, Oxford in 1922 and founded the iconoclastic literary magazine the "Oxford Broom". While at Oxford he enjoyed a brief but passionate affair with Evelyn Waugh who immortalised him as the flamboyant and decadent dandy 'Anthony Blanche' in Brideshead Revisited and dedicated his first novel, "Decline and Fall".

Work

Acton's own works include "Memoirs of an Aesthete" and "The Bourbons of Naples, 1734-1825", a gossipy history of the Bourbon rulers of the Kingdom of Naples in the 18th century. He also wrote "Peonies and Ponies", the most popular satirical book about the clash between European and Chinese culture.

In 1974 he was named a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE). When he died he left Villa La Pietra to New York University.

Following Acton's death at the age of 89, DNA testing revealed the existence of a half-sister, whose heirs have gone to court to challenge Acton's $500 million bequest to New York University.

Acton was buried at the Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori in the suburb of Florence, Galluzzo (Italy).

See [Edward Chaney] , "Sir Harold Acton", "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography".

References

* Green, Martin, "Children of the Sun", London 1977.
* Lord, James "Some Remarkable Men"

External links

* [http://www.glbtq.com/literature/acton_h.html Harold Acton at the Gay/Bi/Lesbian Encyclopedia]