HESKETH-HARVEY, Christopher Jon "Kit" (d c 1 Feb 2023) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Hesketh-Harvey
Shinjinee Sen
Richard R
Obit in the Times of 3 Feb 2023:
Kit Hesketh-Harvey obituary
Lyricist, screenwriter, opera director and one half of Kit and the Widow, a cabaret act considered the modern Flanders and Swann
He wrote songs, screenplays, stage musicals, librettos and novels, which led some to describe him as a “Renaissance man”. Others saw him as a modern-day Noël Coward. It was an image he played up to, with a penchant for silk dressing gowns, although in the main he preferred to call himself “jack of all trades”, insisting that he had “no unfulfilled ambitions because I’ve never had any. I’ve just taken the job that came along.”
He was perhaps best known as one half of the satirical comedy duo Kit and the Widow. With Hesketh-Harvey writing and singing the songs and Richard Sisson accompanying him on piano, they performed together for 30 years, their old-school campery graduating from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End and to private shows for the great and the good. Prince Charles and Princess Diana were enthusiastic fans, and the duo performed regularly at parties thrown by Earl Spencer.
…The camp posturing of Kit and the Widow caused speculation about his sexuality and he acknowledged having had affairs with both sexes in his youth. “When you’re 21 all your friends are pretty,” he said, although his ex-wife, Katie Rabett, claimed “that camp thing is all a façade — part of the cabaret act”…
…[he proposed] to her by telephone while lying in the bath. Their engagement was announced in the court and social pages of The Times in 1985. They married the following year in Canterbury Cathedral, with Sisson as best man…
…He is survived by their two children, Augusta “Gus” Hesketh-Harvey, a singer, and Rollo Hesketh-Harvey, who works in finance. The family home was a three-storey Georgian pile in the Norfolk village of Stoke Ferry, with an inherited beach house in Cornwall for holidays. However, after 35 years of marriage the couple separated in 2020 under the pressures of lockdown. Hesketh-Harvey wanted to form a bubble with his wife, forcing her to choose between her husband and Ian Harrison, an Old Etonian financier to whom she had become close…Divorce proceedings followed in 2022…
…One of his Country Life stories involved walking his dogs on a beach close to Sandringham and being approached by an officer from the royal protection squad. “I hope you’ve got a lead for those dogs, sir,” he was politely told. “There’s three corgis coming your way . . . and there’s a Queen on the end of them.”
Christopher John Hesketh- Harvey was born in 1957 in Zomba, Nyasaland (now Malawi), the eldest of three children and only son to Susan (née Ford) and Noel Harvey. His father was a Foreign Office career diplomat who was posted to southern Africa as a district commissioner and oversaw the transition in 1964 from British rule to the independent state of Malawi. His sister is the journalist Sarah Sands…
Kit Hesketh-Harvey, writer and singer, was born on April 30, 1957. He died suddenly on February 1, 2023, aged 65
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kit-hesketh-harvey-obituary-l0bmmwd8l