This week: a socialite and muse of Alexander McQueen and a star of The Producers

THE socialite and reality television star Annabelle Neilson, who has died aged 49, became a fixture on the London fashion scene in the early Noughties. She was good friends with Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell and became a muse for the designer Alexander McQueen, who was also her best friend.

Neilson was born into an aristocratic family (she was related to the Queen Mother on her mother's side) but did not have a happy time when she was younger. She was bullied at school and left aged 16 without any qualifications. She later moved to Australia but was the victim of a terrible assault that required her to have reconstructive surgery on her face.

Speaking about the attack years later, Neilson said it led to her using heroin as a coping mechanism but she did later manage to get off drugs in her twenties.

She became friends with McQueen very quickly after meeting him in the 1990s and she became an inspiration and muse for his work as a designer. McQueen killed himself in 2010 and Neilson was said to be the last person to see him alive. At the time of her death, she was working on a book about their friendship.

In 2014, she joined Bravo TV's reality show Ladies of London, which followed the lives of eight socialites. She married the banker Nat Rothschild in 1994, but they were divorced in 1997. She had written a series of books called The Me Me Mes.

THE actor Gary Beach, who has died aged 70, was a veteran of Broadway and television whose portrayal of the terrible theatre director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers won him a Tony Award in 2001.

Beach’s other Broadway roles included Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast and Albin in the 2004 revival of La Cage aux Folles, both of which earned him Tony nominations.

The Producers opened in 2001 and starred Nathan Lane as Max and Matthew Broderick as Leo, and featured Cady Huffman as Ulla and Roger Bart as Carmen Ghia.

Beach played the self-absorbed and beyond-flamboyant director who gets to go on as Hitler and leads the cast in Springtime For Hitler, the show’s most famous number. He reprised the role in the 2005 film.

Born in Alexandria, Virginia, Beach had always wanted to be a performer on Broadway. He did over 1,000 performances in New York and over 800 performances in 1776, the show that got him to Broadway.

He survived flops — The Mooney Shapiro Songbook, a one-performance bomb in 1981 — and had great hits including Legends starring two real-life theatre legends, Mary Martin and Carol Channing. “The first day of rehearsal in Los Angeles, there I was, sitting between Peter Pan and Dolly Levi,” he recalled.

After nearly 20 years in New York, Beach moved to Los Angeles. “I fell in love with the idea of having a car like an adult,” he said. There, he acted in such shows as Murder, She Wrote, Saved by the Bell and Will & Grace.

He stayed in California for 13 years, only coming back to do Beauty and the Beast. He broke his ankle during the run after falling off a stack of dishes, went back to Los Angeles and got a call asking him to do a reading of The Producers.

Beach’s favourite moment in the show was a section of lyrics added to the Springtime for Hitler number during the pre-Broadway run in Chicago.

“It’s when Hitler does the tap challenge with the Allies and ends up rolling the wheelchair-bound Franklin Roosevelt off the stage,” Beach explained. “Brooks wrote, ‘It ain’t no mystery/If it’s politics or history/The thing you’ve got to know is/Everything is show biz.’”