Acton, Sir Harold Mario Mitchell

▪ 1995

      British writer and connoisseur (b. July 5, 1904, Villa La Pietra, near Florence, Italy—d. Feb. 27, 1994, Villa La Pietra), was "the consummate aesthete of his generation," more admired for his exuberant dilettantism while a student at the University of Oxford in the 1920s and for his lifelong charm than for his many books. The son of an Anglo-Italian father and American mother, Acton went from a privileged childhood at a Tuscan villa to Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford. At Oxford he founded a literary magazine and led a circle of friends that included Graham Greene, Kenneth Clarke, and Evelyn Waugh, who reportedly used Acton as the model for the aesthete Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. From 1932 to 1939 Acton lived in China, lecturing on English literature, translating classical Chinese drama, and collecting art. After serving in the British Royal Air Force in World War II, he returned to the family estate overlooking Florence. He spent the remainder of his life writing, overseeing his extensive art collection, and lavishly entertaining international celebrities, artists, and dignitaries. Acton's books include The Last Medici (1932); Peonies and Ponies (1941), recounting his years in China; the nonfictional Tuscan Villas (1973) and Florence: A Travellers' Companion (1986); collections of poetry and fiction; two works on the Bourbons of Naples; and a two-volume autobiography, Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948) and More Memoirs of an Aesthete (1970). He was knighted in 1974. Acton bequeathed his estate—estimated to be worth between $100 million and $500 million—to New York University.

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