Jacqui Chan, actress who enjoyed a 70-year career and was famous as Lord Snowdon’s ‘first true love’
Jacqui Chan, actress who enjoyed a 70-year career and was famous as Lord Snowdon’s ‘first true love’
Telegraph ObituariesTue, May 26, 2026 at 12:46 PM UTC
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Jacqui Chan with Rex Harrison in Cleopatra (1963): ‘My death scene was a particular challenge because… I could see right up the togas of the men bending over me’ - Keystone Press/Alamy
Jacqui Chan, who has died aged 91, was an actress of Chinese heritage who enjoyed a long career in Britain; she was also a girlfriend and muse of the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, the future Lord Snowdon, before his marriage to Princess Margaret.
Her best-known film role remained one of her first: as Gwennie Lee, the bespectacled, mild-mannered knitting enthusiast and Hong Kong prostitute in The World of Suzie Wong (1960). Gwennie serves as confidante to the American architect (William Holden) who has fallen for her fellow “Wan Chai girl” Suzie, played by Nancy Kwan.
Despite the character’s dowdiness, many reviewers judged that Jacqui Chan’s “potently attractive personality” (in the words of the Daily Express) eclipsed the leading lady. Particular attention was paid to her role because, some months before the film’s release, Jacqui Chan had become famous overnight as the former lover of the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones.
When the surprise announcement of Princess Margaret’s engagement to Armstrong-Jones, following a secret romance, came in February 1960, the press scrambled to unearth details of his amatory history, and Jacqui Chan was profiled at length.
“I welcome the fame. Who wouldn’t?” she observed a few weeks into her new-found celebrity. “But not the embarrassment that goes with it.”
Jacqui Chan in the 1960s - Dezo Hoffmann/Rex Features
She had another memorable movie role as Lotus, handmaiden to Elizabeth Taylor’s queen, in the epic Cleopatra (1963), at the time the most expensive film ever made. “The sets were as lavish in real life as they appear on screen – no wonder the budget soared out of control,” Jacqui Chan recalled. “I wore an antique headdress made of beaten gold and coral that belonged in a museum. Whenever my shoot was finished they’d whip it off me and lock it in a safe.”
Her character perished dramatically after trying to poison Cleopatra and then being forced to drink from the chalice she has doctored. “My death scene was a particular challenge because I had to lie unmoving and… I could see right up the togas of the men bending over me.”
She came to another sticky end in the volcano disaster movie Krakatoa, East of Java (1968), her character’s romance with Sal Mineo being curtailed when she is felled by a plummeting chunk of lava.
During an interview in 1962, Jacqui Chan expressed doubts that she would “ever be accepted as an actress in my own right and not as ‘The girl who once went around with…’.” Her career never quite reached the heights her talent merited; it did not help that she turned down a lead role in the film A Girl Named Tamiko (1962) opposite Laurence Harvey – on the grounds, she noted, then, that “it was all a bit too close to home. You see, the part was that of an Oriental girl who goes around with a photographer…”
Though she did much valuable work on stage and television, she remained fixed in the public’s mind as the inamorata of Lord Snowdon. In 2017 she had to endure renewed press attention when their relationship was garishly dramatised in The Crown; as played by Alice Hewkin, she was given no lines in the series but was depicted in an eye-poppingly graphic sex scene with Armstrong-Jones (Matthew Goode) on his studio staircase.
Jacqui Chan attempted to take the programme in her stride, although she insisted: “I would never have chosen the stairs – far too uncomfortable – the kitchen table maybe.”
Jacqueline Chan was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on July 15 1934, the daughter of Isaac Chan, a portrait photographer, and his wife Emily, née Woon-Sam. Both parents had emigrated from British Guiana and were descendents of Chinese labourers who had been indentured to work in the sugar cane plantations following the abolition of slavery.
As Gwennie Lee, with William Holden in The World of Suzie Wong (1960) - Smith Archive/Alamy
A talented dancer, at 16 Jacqui was sent to England to train at Elmhurst Ballet School in Camberley and went on to the Royal Academy of Dance. However, she left after a year, having been cast as a principal dancer in the show Goody Two Shoes at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in 1953.
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She was soon working busily in the theatre as a dancer and actress, and lived in the King’s Road, becoming part of the fashionable Chelsea set. In March 1955, in the course of a long run in The Teahouse of the August Moon at Her Majesty’s Theatre, she met Antony Armstrong-Jones when he photographed her for a magazine.
As Anne De Courcy put it in her biography of Lord Snowdon (2008), “Jacqui, with her porcelain looks and exotic charm, was Tony’s first real love.” Besotted, he photographed her repeatedly: “She was so beautiful, she’s in nearly every book of mine,” he recalled later in life. A bronze bust of her head had pride of place in his studio.
Jacqui Chan seemed equally devoted, helping Armstrong-Jones in his work as much as possible despite her own busy working life. She spent hours painstakingly stitching together squares of cheap rush matting to make a carpet for his studio floor.
In Krakatoa, East of Java (1968) - Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy
But though the usually commitment-phobic Armstrong-Jones astonished some of his friends by hinting about marriage, he eventually reverted to type and began to neglect Jacqui, disappearing for whole weekends without explanation. In 1959, as she was preparing to leave for a European tour of Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, the relationship ended in a furious row.
They remained friends, however, and the following year Armstrong-Jones tasked his friend Robert Belton with breaking it to her that he was marrying Princess Margaret, before it was announced on the six o’clock news. Her response to Belton was: “Well, I hope she can cope better than I could.”
Jacqui Chan was a low-key attendee at the Royal wedding in May 1960, being picked up in a car sent for her by Armstrong-Jones and entering Westminster Abbey through a side door with Belton.
By this time, having won good notices on stage in The World of Suzie Wong, she had secured her role in the film adaptation. Catapulted to fame by her connection with Snowdon, she was then offered the chance to play the title role in Suzie Wong on stage in Australia, which allowed her some respite from the press attention.
In Europe, however, she continued to be besieged: “In Paris I had to smash a man’s camera before he would leave me alone. I enjoyed that.” She turned down an offer of £25,000 to write her autobiography: “I could have filled it with dreary tales about my childhood in Trinidad. What a joke. But I’ve got a conscience. I couldn’t do it.”
Alongside her film work in the 1960s, she played guest roles in popular television series such as The Saint, Dixon of Dock Green, Redcap and Emergency – Ward 10. In 1962 she married the actor and director David Saire, and later in the decade they moved to the Netherlands while she concentrated on bringing up her two daughters, finding interesting work hard to come by: “I thought if I am asked to play another Chinese prostitute who can’t pronounce rice and says lice, I’ll go mad.”
After she separated from her husband in 1979, she returned to Britain and appeared in series such as Thomas and Sarah, The Chinese Detective and Reilly: Ace of Spies. At the same time she formed her own experimental theatre company, producing shows that mixed dance, poetry and mime.
Jacqui Chan in 1960 - Edward Miller/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In 1999 she appeared with Cate Blanchett and Burt Kwouk in the West End revival of David Hare’s Plenty (Almeida), and in 2018 she was among the supple senior thespians cast as dancing nursing-home residents in Alan Bennett’s musical Allelujah! at the National Theatre. Latterly she popped up in Sherlock and Doctors on television, and the film Cruella; she appears in the forthcoming movie Supergirl.
Jacqui Chan is survived by her daughters.
Jacqueline Chan, born July 15 1934, died May 19 2026
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
