There is a famous story about Cary Grant dropping by, unannounced, at the agency that represented him when his agent was out to lunch.This was late in Grant’s career, and the star struck assistant felt she could not leave him out in the waiting room and so let him into the agent’s office. This was why Grant saw a telegram from a notable film producer, whom everyone knew was casting for an important new script, saying simply: “HOW OLD CARY GRANT?” One paid for telegrams by the word, and clearly the producer was asking in terms of suitability for casting for one of the many sorts of films where an ageing Grant played the leading man across from an increasingly younger actress.
Cary Grant & Audrey Hepburn
Grant took out a telegram slip from a draw, and filled out a reply. He left the offices but not before handing the slip to that same starstruck assistant on his way out, saying “send this immedialtey, please.” Which she did. It read, “OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?”
Mr Alexander Fiske-Harrison and The Hon. Antalya Nall-Cain, later Princess of Prussia, at a launch party for Tod’s new line of shoes for Vogue magazine in 2011
In my line of work – if it can be called work – it is not unexpected that I am referenced in the newspapers when ex-girlfriends do something newsworthy. However, tempus fugit and old age creeps up unbeknownst, so I was a little taken aback to find myself cited… if not in the divorce… but when referencing the divorce of the lady formerly known as the Hon. Antalya Nall-Cain.
It seems her marriage to a great, great grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany had come to an end. What I had to do with any of this given that we parted ways over a dozen years ago, and hadn’t met in at least a decade, I had no idea. When we last met, at an Iranian friend’s apartment opposite my favourite restaurant, Cambio de Tercio, I also met him, and they seemed a happy couple.
DAILY MAIL EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Lord Brocket daughter’s fairytale marriage to prince falls apart By RICHARD EDEN Published: 22:06 BST, 7 March 2025 “On the face of it, she was born into immense privilege – the daughter of an ebullient peer who was in possession of an almost unrivalled Ferrari collection, a splendid family seat and a wife of such glamour that she regularly graced the pages of Vogue.”… “Antalya’s past paramours include Old Etonian bullfighter-turned-author Alexander Fiske-Harrison, 13 years her senior”…
However, although back in my mid-thirties I did not mind when the Daily Mail began publicising my relationship with Antalya by overstating our age difference – saying Talya is 13 years older than me when she is 11 – I feel the need to publicly object when their Hollywood accoutning makes me 50-years-old (I am 48), and alters my insurance premiums for everything from bullfighting to polo.
As I said at the time of our… parting of ways… in my own newspaper of choice, The Daily Telegraph, I have only ever wished Antalya the best, but as for the Daily Mail: if you are going to write about me in a viral media world, and that text is not only reprinted in Condé Nast´s Tatler, but is translated into Spanish and reprinted out here in Spain from ¡Hola! magazine to the national newspaper of record, El Mundo, I have to make the correction.
I am 48. Damn it. And single once more…
Signed,
Alexander Ruper Fiske-Harrison, Esq.
Born Queen Charlotte and Chelsea Hospital, London, on July 22nd, 1976.
(P.S. I also can’t resist noting that the House of Hohenzollern were Kings of Prussia for barely two centuries and Emperors of Germany for less than fifty years, making them parvenus in royal circiles, in comparison to my friends from the House of Wettin, from my late friend Con to my very alive friend Boris, from Saxe-Weimar to Saxe-Coburg.)
(P.P.S. And the newspapers have been speculating about my private life since The Daily Telegraph ran this article about another jailed Old Etonian whose daughter I dated, in this case not former Army officer, Lord Brocket, but rather former Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken the same month she graced Condé Nast´s GQ magazine in 2002, a few years before when the same editorial stable´s Tatler ran the susequent feature on me in 2008.)
The Daily Telegraph, dated Friday, February 22, 2002: Peterborough Aitken fille casts caution to the wind Alexandra Aitken’s semi-naked poses for GQ magazine were only the first steps in her campaign to emerge from the shadow of her father, Jonathan. For Peterborough can reveal that Ali’s next project is a provocative short film, entitled The Pantomime, for which she has been cast – in the lead role – as a promiscuous young woman caught up in a love triangle. “It’s causing a lot of laughs in the film industry,” says my mole. The film’s writer, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, is rumoured to be going out with Ali and he’s cast himself in the sex scenes. Ali herself maintains that it’s strictly professional. “We are just good friends,” she insists. “I’m not going to be going naked, either,” Alexander adds, even as he blushes. “He’s written a really illustrative piece about how we all say one thing and do another,” says Daddy’s girl. [Image caption:] Item? Alexandra Aitken and Alexander Fiske-Harrison What does he think of it all? “I’ve told him that it’s a very challenging part, as it focuses on honesty and how deceit breeds more deceit,” she continues without a smile. “I’m afraid he’s not exactly thrilled about it. He told me there are enough thespians in the family and he’s afraid that I’m not going to get any work.”
TATLER
artscene drama
Alexander Fiske-Harrison in the film The Seer with actress Irena Hoffman.
Hottie ahoy!
Meet Alexander the Great at acting/writing/being sexy
Alexander Fiske-Harrison knows how to grab an audience’s attention. “You need sex and death. Give me blood and seminal fluid,” says this 31-year-old dramatist/actor as he discusses his new play The Pendulum, a tragedy set in 19th-century Vienna. Inspired by a group of philosophers called the Vienna Circle, it focuses on a young Austrian cavalry officer, also played by Fiske-Harrison, and his fiancée, a Jewish painter. For the role he drew on his own lovelife, which has included a five-year relationship and a broken engagement. “I’ve had a few break-ups recently,” he says. “So I thought, ‘I can bring anger and jealousy to this.’” Henry Conway, son of disgraced politician Derek Conway, is doing the costumes, even though Fiske-Harrison jokes he’s “lost the plot.”
Xander was brought up in Belgravia with his two brothers by his stockbroker father and an Australian sculptress mother. His stage career started at Eton – not very promisingly. “I was a blind soldier in A Penny for a Song by John Whiting. The girl, my love interest, was played by a boy in the year below. That was the last time I acted at Eton. I said to myself, ‘Unless there’s a real girl…’ I mean, that’s why you do it.” But he still got noticed – he set a record by being sent to the headmaster 68 times. He acted once more while studying PPE at Oxford. “I was being directed by my friend Hugh Dancy but he was not a good director. I hated it. I never acted at Oxford again.”
He went on to win the Oxford New Writing Prize for a play called The Death of an Atheist, which he describes as “very heartfelt and intense.” He ascribes the emotional aspects of his work to the death of his brother Jules at 18 in a skiing accident: “I’ve always thought it led to a lot of my writing. You grow out of it – there’s no pain now when thinking about it – but I think it rotates the brain a few degrees towards the tragic.” Determined to write a novel, he headed to the Moroccan Sahara (“a dustbowl hellhole!”) for three months. “I’d go on camel rides to the dunes then come back and write about my experiences. I knew nothing about it, that life except that I was going slightly mad in the desert and camels aren’t very nice. Tons of people were interested but I couldn’t finish it because it was, like, this epic and I was 21.”
After a stint at the Financial Times weekend magazine and a brief spell at his dad’s firm (which he hated), he went to New York to study method acting at the Stella Adler Studio. “They said, ‘How can we rip every nightclub you’ve ever been in out of your head?’” So they cast me as a gay Mormon lawyer from Utah, in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. This training, as well as his looks, charm and intelligence, got him film work. He played an Italian detective in last year’s The Seer and then a father whose child disappears in the forthcoming Escape.
Fiske-Harrison is a self-confessed party animal: “At Oxford I was in all the very disreputable societies, such as the Assassins, Piers Gaveston and the GridIron.” A regular on the London club scene with Jacobi Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, Henry Conway and Ali Aitken, he is passionate about dancing, especially flamenco and tango, but holds back on the booze. “I find it kills my creative spark. Sometimes I’d have a glass of wine and this amazing stuff came out. Then I’d have a second and even better stuff came out. Third glass – absolute rubbish.” Thankfully, his writing is now attempted only when sober.
Harriet Compston
The Pendulum runs until 28 June at Jermyn Street Theatre, Jermyn Street, SW1 (tel: 020 7287 2875).
[Inset photo caption:]
On stage with the actress Susanne Gschwendtner
[Inset red text:]
He was sent to the head 68 times – a record
Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital as it was in 1976
Alexander's Journal 