Snowdon urged to embrace ‘love child’

The writer and former barrister Sir John Mortimer has urged his old friend Lord Snowdon to forge a relationship with his illegitimate daughter, Polly Fry. The writer Anne de Courcy has claimed in Snowdon: The Biography, to be published next week, that although a DNA test conducted in 2004 showed that Polly was indeed Snowdon's child, she is unhappy that she has not yet achieved the relationship with him she had hoped for.

According to the biography, Polly was born in 1960 in the third week of Snowdon's marriage to Princess Margaret (pictured together). Polly was brought up as the child of the chocolate heir Jeremy Fry and his wife Camilla – both friends of Snowdon's – in the belief that Jeremy was her true father. But from the age of 18, she began to hear rumours from family friends that Snowdon might be her real father.

She contacted Snowdon in 2004 and asked him to take a DNA test. Reluctant at first, he eventually agreed. When the test came back conclusive, Snowdon, as Anne de Courcy puts it, "was just about to turn 74, an age at which few men expect an addition to their family, and had no wish to change the tenor of his life".

Mortimer, who has his own love child - four years ago it was revealed he had a son, Ross Bentley, by the actress Wendy Craig – says: "I, too, discovered late in life that I had a child I had not known about, but it is never too late to make up for lost time. It has turned out to be a wonderful experience for me and for my family and I am sure it will be for Tony as well."