Patrick Macnee provides an interesting description of his life in the autobiography Blind In One Ear (1988).
Daniel Patrick Macnee was born on February 6, 1922 in London. His birthplace is probably the St. Mary's Hospital, as Patrick Macnee writes in his autobiography that "a couple of horses forming sprinted towards Bayswater" when his mother went into labor.
Patrick Macnee was born into a wealthy, aristocratic and eccentric English family. He is the grandson of the Scottish portrait painter Sir Daniel Macnee (Link to works) president of the Royal Scottish Academy in the 19th century. Patrick Macnee was divorced twice and married his third wife, Barbara Sekely, in 1988. He has two children from his first wife and has a grandson.
His father, Daniel "Shrimp" Macnee, was a racehorse trainer who left his family when Macnee was a little child. Later his parents divorced. Since 1929 Patrick Macnee lived with his mother, Dorothea Hastings, nice of the Earl of Huntington, and the mother's girlfriend, at Rooksnest, a Tudor mansion outside Lambourn in Berkshire. "Uncle Evelyn" - as Patrick Macnee said he had to call her - financed Macnee's attendance at Eton College.
An endearing story of his autobiography says that when he was twelve years old he almost set his room on fire while smoking cigarettes. "But at least the incriminating cigarettes had been destroyed by the fire".
Sounds like an omen: The elder Patrick Macnee was a heavy smoker - up to 80 cigarettes daily.
During his last year at Eton he played the role of Macduff in Shakespeare's "Macbeth", a role he played again in Canadian Folio TV production "Macbeth" in 1955.
Quotes from Patrick Macnee's autobiography Blind in one Ear, Glasgow, 1988
