Mark Shand out with Nancy Dell'Olio last September[REX]The son of Major Bruce Shand and the Hon. Rosalind Maud Cubitt, he was born on June 28, 1951, and grew up at the family home in East Sussex, attending Milton Abbey School in Dorset before being expelled for smoking cannabis.
He earned a playboy reputation as a young man when he was a regular at New York nightclub Studio 54. He is credited as saying it “reminded me of the end of the Roman Empire”.
JFK’s daughter Caroline was reportedly crazy about him. He was linked to Bianca Jagger and Jackie Onassis’s sister Lee Radziwill and he proposed unsuccessfully to supermodel Marie Helvin.
A trip to India in 1988 was to change his life forever.
He went on a journey of 800 miles on a female elephant called Tara, later chronicled in his book Travels On My Elephant.
It was the start of a love affair that led to him making a number of documentaries about them including the BBC’s Queen Of The Elephants.
In 2002 he founded the charity Elephant Family to try to save the endangered Asian elephant.
Divorced from former French actress Clio Goldsmith in 2009, Mr Shand, who lived in Bayswater, London.
He was typically amusing over speculation that he was romantically involved with Nancy Dell’Olio.
He said: “Let me be clear, I have never had an affair with Nancy Dell’Olio.
“There is no romance; there has not been any romance, there never will be.”
He said he was “more likely to have an affair with a ripe pomegranate”.
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