House of Guinness's real-life descendant reveals true family history - from royal parties to fart jokes and cheeky toys

Knight is one of our most successful screenwriters – from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (as one of the quiz show’s three creators) to the dark grit of Peaky Blinders – and was recently announced as the writer of the next Bond film. Lowell has written a memoir of her extraordinary life, Why Not Say What Happened? (a line lifted from one of her stepfather’s poems) and, 15 years on, is deep into writing another.

The two have come together to create The House of Guinness, which starts in 1868 in Dublin with the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness, the man responsible for the astonishing success of his family’s brewery.

The series is full of zip and brio, dash and panache, intrigue and violence – with Sean Rafferty, the family’s fixer (played by James Norton), striding down the streets in a long black coat, handing out punches and kisses in equal measure. There’s a strong musical score (à la Peaky), including controversial Irish group Kneecap’s song Get Your Brits Out thumping during a fight scene at the funeral procession.

The first two (of eight) episodes introduce us to Sir Benjamin’s children, to whom he left a fortune equivalent to £100 million today (according to the helpful on-screen caption). But let’s just say that none of the four – Arthur (Anthony Boyle), Edward (Louis Partridge), Anne (Emily Fairn) and Benjamin Jr (Fionn O’Shea) – is happy with the reading.

It has taken some years for the drama to get to this point, which, Lowell explains, started with her 20-page treatment. Several writers had a bash at developing it unsuccessfully, before she had word that Knight might be interested, whereupon she finally became hopeful that it could take flight.

The most useful research for Knight, he says, was meeting Lowell for the first time. “We talked about how the family works. Here is this family that is incredibly successful and driven, makes lots of money, but is different to any family anywhere else because they were always considered to be outsiders, having made their money in ‘trade’.

“They had a desire to join the aristocracy, but at the same time a pull in the opposite direction, of equal strength, towards artists and renegades and a wilder sort of life. Each of them has inside them – this is how I see it – this Guinness thing [he has made their fatal flaw into a noun – “Guinnessness”: the act of being in a perfect situation, only to blow it all up] that was always going to make them go outside what was conventional. That’s what makes them charismatic, but also flawed and tragic.

“They’ve got this juggernaut of a business, continuing among this group of people who are aware of their own absurdity – who are funny, who are creative and who are drawn to a sort of madness and wildness sometimes.”

Knight loved the descriptions Lowell shared with him of the gloomy family houses in the country (which in her memoir are also terrifyingly alive in their decay): “They’re huge and cold, there’s no food... but there’s always a bottle.

“And, yes, dark things happen and mistakes are made, but it’s all from the point of view of this incredibly successful family who are still outsiders and yet somehow – well, not somehow, the beer helps – are still kind of beloved by the ordinary people.”

Picking up on Knight’s phrase “ordinary people”, I wonder whether Lowell would ever have met someone from Knight’s background growing up? However much her mother rebelled against the class aspirations and snobbery (not to mention unapologetic antisemitism) of her own mother, it’s hard not to be affected by years of these attitudes being drilled into you, even if deeply buried.

“Of course,” she says, almost puzzled by the question, “because my mother loved artists. When she married Lucian Freud [Caroline Blackwood’s first husband – though the marriage was short, she is in some of the renowned artist’s most famous portraits], he was a penniless divorcee and he was Jewish, all three things that my grandmother absolutely hated.

“Then she married Israel Citkowitz [Polish composer and pianist, also Jewish], who I didn’t really know [they had already separated when Ivana was born; her birth father was actually one of Caroline’s lovers, Ivan Moffat, screenwriter of Giant – the search for the identity of her real father was a defining part of her early life]. And then she married Robert Lowell, so there were always artists and writers, it was nothing to do with class. It was really to do with whether or not you were clever.”

Knight gets where my question is coming from. Artists are one thing – Lucian Freud’s grandfather, for instance, was Sigmund Freud; Robert Lowell’s ancestors came over on the Mayflower – neither husband was from working-class stock.

Knight starts by saying that the Guinness family had so much money that they didn’t have the same insecurities as the minor aristocracy, “to whom it is incredibly important to be seen as different to the people below, and where all sorts of barriers are put up to force their elevated position.

“But also, there is something intrinsic, where there is an instant connection. You ask, ‘Would Ivana ever have met me?’ So, I would have gone shoeing horses with my dad and the crucial point is this… Usually we’d be in scrap metal yards with gypsies, but sometimes we would go to a place like a Guinness estate and whoever was in charge would be exactly like one of us.

“Usually, it would be a bloke who owns all this land and horses, but he comes to the forge and he warms his hands; he’s just great and a laugh and he has a drink. And the way I wanted to write this – regardless of what they see as their curse as well as their blessing – is that there’s something about this family that isn’t the toff, it just isn’t.”

Lowell agrees. “Growing up, I never felt that we were toffs. I hate that word! I thought we were like the poorest people ever. My mother didn’t like cars, so we’d have the most beaten-up old thing and my friends at school used to make fun of me. I was embarrassed when my mother picked me up from school. And she felt the same way about her mother picking her up from school. So I certainly didn’t feel we were rich – I didn’t even know what that was. There was no snobbery in my family apart from intellectually. And I really don’t think I’m snobby.”

What about you, Steven? “Well, very appropriately, I’m a snob about beer – and I do drink Guinness,” he says, with a big laugh. “I used to own a brewery, such was my snobbery about beer. I cannot bear bad beer! And, weirdly, I employed my brother, so it was a family business. Our brewery made wonderful beer; we ran it for several years and then sold it. It’s called Freedom beer – it’s still going and very successful.”

The Guinness who really deserves a show of her own is Lowell’s maternal grandmother, Maureen, for whom double-barrel aristos were clearly not enough; she married the lavishly titled Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.

Along with polishing her prejudices, the Marchioness was not shy about her friendship with the Queen Mother (throwing her an annual party at her home) and had a notably vulgar sense of humour. A memorable scene in 2021 BBC drama A Very English Scandal, about Margaret Duchess of Argyll’s hostile divorce, featured someone unleashing a mechanised penis at a dinner party.

“I’m afraid that was my grandmother,” Lowell says, only a touch ruefully. “She did have a fake penis and would bring it out now and then. Sometimes she would put it on her nose. My mother was mortified. And she used to dress up as the maid [complete with a fake accent to greet her guests]. She was the most embarrassing... If she hadn’t been a Guinness, she would have been on the stage.”

Does she share her grandmother’s sense of humour? “Not the vulgarity. She was too much. She used to have a fart machine which she put under her legs! My mother had a really dark sense of humour – we definitely share that. I love my family. They’re crazy, but
I love them.”

Lowell is talking on Zoom, in her cut-glass English accent, from a pale, chic-looking, light-filled drawing room in East Hampton, one of the Long Island resorts where wealthy Manhattanites retreat for the summer. I was surprised that she wasn’t still in her mother’s beloved Sag Harbor house, but she says that it had to be sold: “It was so run down; it was too much like our old houses, which I grew up in. I’m in a very normal house now.”

There was nothing normal about Lowell’s upbringing and no doubt some of the more negative aspects have left their impact. When I say her mother’s husbands were like the holy trinity of artists, she answers drily: “Well, she was a great supporter of the arts, my mother.”

I say “drily”, but Lowell’s tone is not always straightforward to read. She has an open, friendly, likeable way, but with a hint of an eagerness to please, which can be a consequence of having to shape-shift constantly around unpredictable, sometimes venomous, behaviour. Her mother was also her drinking buddy and what seems all too predictable, as she acknowledges, is that she, too, became an addict.

One of the most painful passages in her book is the description of being grateful as a lonely little girl for the nocturnal visits from her nanny’s husband – at least it was attention and she could persuade herself it was affection. As a child, an accident resulted in boiling water scalding her nether regions, requiring long months in hospital and endless plastic surgery. Many years later, her psychotherapist suggested that this may have been a subconscious attempt to prevent the abuse by mutilating herself.

Her 26-year-old daughter, Daisy (by her ex-husband, interior designer Matthew Miller), is upstairs while we are talking. Has she rebelled against the bohemian “craziness” of her family and become, say, a chartered surveyor? “Actually, she’s working in real estate, so that’s almost a chartered surveyor, isn’t it?” Lowell says. “She’s bossy and opinionated and very persuasive, so she’s a perfect real estate agent.”

Mother and daughter were excited about being extras in the series, as they dressed in costume and went on set. “It was such fun! Daisy was so happy and excited but,” she says with a shrug, “I think the scene got cut.”

How do Lowell’s many relatives feel about this project? “I thought there would be some pushback but everyone I’ve spoken to in the family is really excited. They’re like, ‘Oh my God! That’s amaaazing!’ They haven’t seen it yet, that’s another thing – but, in theory, they’re loving the idea.”

They are already thinking about a second series. Knight can’t talk about it but will admit: “I’d like to keep it going to the 1960s and 70s.” “I want it to go to the present day.” Lowell adds. Knight: “I didn’t dare say that!” (Knight is 66, Lowell, 59 – so enough innings in them yet.)

“All my cousins are like, ‘Can I be in it?’” she continues. “And I said, ‘No, it hasn’t come to you yet.’ It’s very funny. My grandmother and her two sisters could have a whole series just on them... they were known as ‘the Glorious Guinness Girls’.

“What Steven was saying about the Guinnesses being outsiders is true: they always wanted to marry into the aristocracy and my grandmother didn’t really like the Guinness thing, she thought that it was a bit sort of – beer,” Lowell wrinkles her nose in faux disdain. “So, they all married men with titles, they had more money than God, but what they wanted was the cachet of being in society and being accepted.”

I mustn’t finish the interview without mentioning Bond. “I can’t talk about it,” Knight says. While Lowell is an open book, Knight keeps his pages firmly shut. He never talks about his family, neither his wife nor his seven children (continuing the family tradition), other than saying they are engaged with the world.

But his manner is appealing rather than prickly and he has a mellifluous turn of phrase, describing the way the Guinnesses “gather around their flaws”. Although he didn’t come from money, he must be worth a lot now – he is never not working. He says that writing is his hobby as well as his work. The epitaphs they choose for themselves seem apt – Knight: “He worked hard”; Lowell: “She tried”.

And I have to keep trying to get something on Bond. Will he be taking the edginess of the Peaky and Guinness shows into this new territory, or would that be totally inappropriate for the world of shaken not stirred?

“We’ll see, we’ll see…” he says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen until you start writing.”

Do you even know yet who the new Bond is? “No.”

So, you’re writing with no one in mind?

“Er... yes.”

Do you believe him, Ivana?

“I believe everything Steven says.”

I tease him for being as inscrutable as his new character, 007 – he is indeed a man of mystery himself, and Lowell cracks up. “That’s it, now we know why he’s not telling – he’s the new Bond!”

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House of Guinness is coming to Netflix on Thursday 25th September 2025.

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