A Guinness Heiress Goes to Netflix

 

 

 

 

  Ivana Lowell talks about spinning her high-drama family tales into “House of Guinness” with the “Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight.

"“House of Guinness” is not Ms. Lowell’s first foray into her family’s back pages. In the 2010 memoir “Why Not Say What Happened?” she recounted, in admirably measured prose, the harrowing story of her upbringing in a rundown English manor by parents and guardians of whom the most charitable thing that could be said was that they were epically negligent.

When Ms. Lowell was 6, she was sexually abused by the husband of her nanny, she writes. An accident with a kettle caused third-degree burns over much of her body, leaving her with lifelong scars. The man she believed to be her father — Caroline Blackwood’s second husband, the pianist Israel Citkowitz — would prove to be no relation. She learned that her biological father was the screenwriter Ivan Moffatt, one of her mother’s lovers. Her sister Natalya died of a heroin overdose at 18.

“I have no idea how I survived it all,” Ms. Lowell said. “I think because I didn’t know any better or any worse. I was burned and raped and abused, and that’s just how it was. If you don’t know any different, you think this is normal. The Guinness sense of humor helped.”"

 A Guinness Heiress Goes to Netflix –