Program Title
Nancy Astor

Based On
Biography by Christopher Sykes

Adapted By
Derek Marlowe

Number of Episodes:
8

Description
Nancy, Lady Astor, was born Nancy Langhorne in post-Civil War Virginia. After a disastrous early marriage to a dissolute Boston socialite, she married a millionaire philanthropist in England, Waldorf Astor. Largely as a result of her persistent campaigning, Waldorf won a seat in the British House of Commons. When he was automatically elevated to the House of Lords after his father's death in 1919, Nancy herself fought for--and won--her husband's old constituency seat in Plymouth in a by-election, becoming the first woman to enter the Commons as a Member of Parliament. A fierce, outspoken campaigner, she gained international notoriety when her 'Cliveden Set' was embroiled in the row over appeasement with Adolf Hitler. This drama traces Nancy's life from Virginia in the 1890's to England into the 1950's.


Original broadcast date
1984-04-08

Cast	Characters
Lisa Harrow	Nancy Astor
Pierce Brosnan	Robert Gould Shaw
Nigel Havers	Bobby Shaw
James Fox	Waldorf Astor
Dan O'Herlihy	Chiswell Langhorne
Sylvia Syms	Nanaire
Lise Hilboldt	Phyllis
David Warner	Philip Kerr
Julian Glover	Lord Revelstoke
Marsha Fitzalan	Wissie Astor
Michael Troughton
Lillian Silverstone	Irene

Credits

Producer: Philip Hinchcliffe
Director: Richard Stroud

Intro
NANCY ASTOR/Episode 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke

Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Tonight we begin a series in eight parts on the life and times of Nancy Astor--or maybe I should say--the rather devastating effect of Nancy Astor on the life and times of everybody she came in contact with.

For those who are too young to remember, this whirlwind of a woman cut a swathe first through Virginia, then through Boston, and for most of her life through London. Let me say crisply at the start that she was one of the famous Langhorne sisters of Virginia. She eventually married one of the richest men in England of the transplanted American family, the Astors. She became the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons, and, as her devoted enemy Winston Churchill once said: The House of Commons has never been the same since.

Well, her story--this story--begins in Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1880s. Nancy is nine, one of five girls, and three boys--the children of Chiswell Langhorne, who is always known as Shilly. For many generations, his family had owned a plantation only modestly prosperous until the Civil War. After that, they lost everything. The house and its acres were the ruins of a battlefield. The slaves had gone to find a job, and there was no stock, no horses, cattle, mules, sheep, nothing. Langhorne had fought throughout the war and came out of it at the age of twenty-two with, he said, a wife, two children, a ragged seat to my pants and a barrel of whisky. He then held a job as a night watchman and then as a piano salesman. He was totally unmusical but he memorized three or four chords and he used to finish the deal by playing them with a spectacular flourish, to demonstrate what he called the fine tone. He was a charmer, and he had a theatrical touch. And together, these combined to give him, finally, steady employment as a tobacco auctioneer.

That's what he was doing when Nancy was born, and that's what he's doing when we find him now. He will meet a man named Liggett, and together they will go into railroad building. Shilly will make a fortune and find the dream house that remained, for Nancy Langhorne, Astor, a lifetime haven.





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