Katie Boyle: Actress and Eurovision presenter who became an agony aunt

After a decade as an actress and model in the 1950s, Katie Boyle, who had died aged 91, became a celebrity best known for simply being herself, notably as the presenter of four Eurovision Song Contests.

Her aristocratic background – Radio Times originally billed her as Viscountess Boyle – and multilingual talents as a fluent speaker of English, Italian and French made the Italian marquis’s daughter a huge star.

She presented the British-hosted 1960, 1963, 1968 and 1974 contests. During the first, she displayed an ability to keep calm when the connection to Italy was lost. Boyle’s “poise and elegance” in the face of such hitches were praised when she won the 1964 European Radio & Television Personality award.

The 1974 contest, won by Abba, passed into folklore as the one for which she dispensed with her underwear – because it was showing through her satin dress.

Boyle later played herself in the 1982 BBC radio play The Competition, about a fictional international song contest held in Bridlington, on the North Yorkshire coast.

During the 1960s, she was also the face of Camay commercials. She originally turned them down because her face was allergic to the soap, but manufacturer Procter & Gamble changed its formula. Then, from 1970 to 1988, Boyle, was TV Times’s agony aunt with her “Dear Katie” column, frequently the most read page in the magazine.

She was born Caterina Irene Elena Maria Imperiali di Francavilla at the Villa Fiorita, in the Tuscan hills outside Florence. Her flamboyant father, the Marchese Demetrio Imperiali dei Principi di Francavilla, was half-Neopolitan and half-Russian, and a fascist. Her mother, Dorothy Ramsden, from Yorkshire, was half-English, half-Australian.

Caterina’s childhood was spent among princesses, duchesses and marchesas and, as she recalled in her 1980 autobiography, What This Katie Did, her cosmopolitan background gave her “Italian volatility and Russian romanticism” and a “strong streak of Yorkshire stock”.

However, her parents separated when she was five. Her father then married the wealthy half-French, half-English widow of a British shipping tycoon while her mother moved back to Britain. Caterina moved between her parents and was educated in both Britain and Italy, as well as at a school in “neutral” Switzerland where she learned French.

She had the distinction of being expelled from four out of six private schools. At Poggio Imperiale, in wartime Florence, she was compelled to wear the Piccola Italiana uniform of black skirt, white shirt and black tie, and march to fascist songs. Her education finished at the Collegio del Sacro Cuore (the Sacred Heart College), in Rome.

During the war, her father helped to save Italian Jews from being sent to German work camps and, for several months, kept his daughter virtually imprisoned in the house. Her boyfriend, a married Secret Police officer involved with Partisans, was executed. She was then incarcerated in a sanatorium for nine months at her dominant father’s behest.

Returning to Britain with her mother in 1946, Caterina learned shorthand and typing at Pitman’s College, London. While looking around a Bond Street milliner’s, a Woman’s Own journalist asked her to be the model for a feature on hat-buying.

But a modelling career was put on hold when she married Richard Boyle, a viscount and Irish Guards captain, in 1947 and miscarried their child after falling down a flight of stairs.

A love of cinema pushed Boyle towards the film world. As Catherine Carleton (her husband was Baron Carleton of Yorkshire, giving her the title Lady Boyle), she played school secretary Miss Weston in the comedy Old Mother Riley Headmistress (1950), with music-hall stars Arthur Lucan and Kitty McShane.

Boyle also danced in the chorus at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in the pantomime Dick Whittington (1949-50), starring Paul Scofield and Geraldine McEwen. Although she acted in another film, The House in the Square (1951), she then became a full-time model, still as Catherine Carleton, with catwalk jobs and work for Vogue.

Her growing fame led the BBC producer Richard Afton to feature Boyle in the “Beauty Spot” on his variety show Quite Contrary (1953). After one programme, he made her its presenter, shortly before her divorce from her first husband and marriage to racehorse owner Greville Baylis.

This introduction to television led to an appearance in the 1954 Royal Variety Performance and a return to acting. Billed as Catherine Boyle, she was in the films The Diary of Major Thompson (1955), The Truth About Women (1957), Not Wanted on Voyage (1957), Intent to Kill (1958) and the Italian production First Love (1959), as well as a string of television plays.

Then, she landed the starring role in the BBC adventure serial Golden Girl (1960). As Katie Johnson, she was the secretary who through an unexpected inheritance becomes the world’s richest woman. Boyle’s own Pekinese dogs, Mi-tzi and Tai-Tai, were also featured.

However, the Eurovision Song Contest brought Boyle fame in her own right and she left acting behind. She presented the ITV advertising magazine Mayfair Merry-go-round and, over the years, was a panellist on Juke Box Jury (1960-1965), Call My Bluff (1967-1970), Punchlines (1981-1983), Blankety Blank (1979-1985) and the English, American and Italian versions of What’s My Line? She hosted her own BBC Radio 2 show, Katie & Friends in 1990.

Boyle’s love of dogs led her to sit on the Battersea Dogs’ Home committee and become agony aunt for Dogs Today.

She always denied claims that she had an affair with Prince Philip during the 1950s. Although she was cited as co-respondent in a 1974 divorce case, she was reunited with her second husband until his death two years later. In 1979, Boyle married the theatre producer Peter Saunders. Three years later, he was knighted and she became Lady Saunders. He died in 2003.

Katie Boyle, actress, television presenter, model and agony aunt, born 29 May 1926 , died 20 March 2018