Presenter of the Eurovision Song Contest and agony aunt
Born: May 29, 1926;
Died: March 20, 2018
KATIE Boyle, Lady Saunders, who has died aged 91, was a model, agony aunt and presenter who became one of the most familiar faces on television in the 1960s and 70s. She presented the Eurovision Song Contest four times but was also a regular on game shows and adverts, most famously for Camay soap; she was also the resident agony aunt in the TV Times for nearly 20 years.
Boyle's image was one of genteel calm, but her personal life was anything but. Born in Italy in 1926 to an Italian father and English mother, her parents divorced when she was five and she became the subject of a furious battle for custody.
School was difficult for the young Katie - she was expelled at least four times and her father, who had custody, eventually sent her to a convent school in Rome, where she stayed until she was 17. However, when Katie later embarked on an affair with a friend of her father, he sent her to an asylum where she stayed for several months, eventually escaping with the help of the owners.
She then moved to Britain to be with her mother and embarked on a modelling career after being spotted trying on a hat in a shop. She came to prominence on television in the 1950s when panel games were the hit of the nation's one and only channel. She also worked as a continuity announcer for the BBC.
She went on to dip her toe into many other areas of the entertainment industry and had a career that spanned more than six decades.
In her capacity as a host she fronted shows such as the Ivor Novello Awards, and she had a long-running radio programme called Katie and Friends on BBC Radio 2.
She appeared on panel game shows and programmes including What's My Line? and Juke Box Jury.
When the Eurovision song contest began to grab audience attention, she seemed the obvious choice to host it. It was her highest calibre role, which she performed four times across 13 years when the event was held in the UK - most notably in 1974 in Brighton when Abba triumphed.
She started writing for the TV Times in 1970 and continued to answer readers' letters for the next 18 years. A lover of dogs, she was also a committee member of Battersea Dogs Home for more than 25 years and wrote Battersea Tales - stories of rescues from the dogs home in 1997.
She married three times and wrote about her life in showbusiness in 1980 in her autobiography What This Katie Did. Her first marriage was to Richard Boyle and her second to the racehorse owner Greville Baylis. Latterly, she was married to Peter Saunders, the theatre producer and the man responsible for The Mousetrap.
Katie Boyle once said that her whole career had been an accident. "There was a time when I was on the BBC three times a week - it seems very strange to think of that now, but it was the only thing people watched," she said.
Katie Boyle was pre-deceased by her husband in 2003.
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