Who is Jeremy Clarkson's Irish-born partner Lisa Hogan? (2024)

Once the wife of a multi-millionaire baron and a successful actress after being taken under the wing of Monty Python legend John Cleese, Lisa Hogan has lived and travelled all over the world.

But these days the Dublin-born former model and artist, 51, spends most of her time gallivanting around fields in muddy boots and running the shop on boyfriend Jeremy Clarkson's Diddly Squat Farm in the Cotswolds.

It was Lisa who, due to the pandemic, ended up filming much of Clarkson's Farm, the new Amazon Prime series which documents the ex-Top Gear presenter's frequently failed attempts to run his 1,000-acre farm, much to the bemusem*nt and exasperation of the locals.

Mother-of-three Lisa is 10 years younger than twice-divorced Clarkson, 61, whom she has been dating since 2017, but almost matches him in height at astatuesque 6ft 2in beside his 6ft 5in frame. And if you thought Clarkson had led a colourful life, his girlfriend's is equally as eventful.

Educated at the prestigious Alexandra College in Ireland, she got her big break in acting in the early 1990s, when John Cleese employed her as a researcher. She was later cast as a sea lion keeper in the 1997 comedy flick Fierce Creatures, starring alongsideCleese, Michael Palin and Jamie Lee Curtis.

She was once referred to as Cleese's muse, but denied any suggestion they were romantically involved, tellingIrish Independent journalist Barry Egan: 'We certainly didn't have an affair. We were seen quite a lot but we used to work together. We got on well.'

In August 1997, Lisa - then aged 25 - had a near-death experience when her partner's £1million private Lear jet crash-landed on the A40 dual-carriageway after it overshot the runway atRAF Northolt in London.

Lisa was the only passenger on board, travelling from Palma to rehearse for Fierce Creatures in the UK, and told how she was 'almost a goner' after the captain had tried to make her sit in a certain part of the plane.

'I insisted on sitting where I was, which was just as well because that was the area where the van came through when we crashed and I would have been killed instantly,' she told Egan. 'When the plane crashed I phoned the production office [of the film] and told them I was stuck in a traffic jam. They were like, "Everybody's late because a bloody plane landed on the motorway". I was embarrassed.'

Her partner at the time was Baron Steven Bentinck, a Madrid based billionaire and private art collector, and nephew of the late steel tycoon Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszon Heini, who once boasted he had £50m of annual disposable income.

The couple married in the late 1990s and had three children - Wolfe, Alice and Lizzy - with Lisa dividing her time between London, New York, a mansion in Klosters - the exclusive Swiss ski resort -Norris Castle on the Isle of Wight, andMoyns Park -a Grade I listed Elizabethan country house on Lord Ivar Mountbatten's 444 acre stately pile in Essex. They'd also holiday on Bentinck's£5million Zaca A Te Moana yacht -a 150ft replica of Errol Flynn’s famous yacht Zaca.

Lisa and Bentinck split in 2005 and Lisa allegedly employed Prince Charles's divorce lawyer, Fiona Shackleton. They officially separated in 2011. By this point Lisa was a fully fledged member of high society, counting the likes ofAA Gill and Bryan Ferry as friends.

Lisa, who lost her father Maurice Hogan, an architect, when she was 14 after he dropped dead of a heart attack, is thestep-daughter of Raymond Keaveney, former director of the National Gallery in Dublin.

Her mother is ex-model Arlene Underwood, whose 'grit' Lisa has inherited; at 41 she was widowed with four young daughters and enrolled at Trinity College for four years studying for a doctorate before setting upFriends of the National Gallery.

'I saw her pushing through and going into a lot of zones that she'd never been in before. I'd come home with my sisters after school and mum would just be writing these essays. She'd say, "I haven't used my brain for so long, and I can't ever remember writing anything like this", and she'd just be sobbing,' Lisa recalled. 'I'm so proud of her.'

She's also inherited her parents' artistic skills; Lisa runs a studio in London where she craftsfigurative and animal sculptures which are much admired on Instagram.

In an interview with Amazon about running Diddly Squat Farm, Lisa said she's 'learned a lot' - largely as her boyfriend 'didn't have a clue' while she's 'quite practical'.

'He knows roads, but he doesn't know land that much,' she said.'There was a big learning curve, but he's such a prolific character, once he puts his head to something it's just full-on.'

She added that she keeps trying to move to London but 'must be a country girl at heart' because she 'always seems to end up there'.

'And that's where I seem to be happiest,' she admitted. 'I have a studio in London that I try to go to once a week, and Jeremy calls it "pavement-itis" where I just need the pavement under my feet.'

Meanwhile Clarkson - who has three children, Katya, Emily and Finlo - praised his partner for 'working her socks off' on their new endeavour, adding: 'I think she's really enjoying doing that, because she's even less of a country girl than I am – though she'll probably say different.

'She was born in Dublin and has lived in Switzerland, Majorca, and London… and yet there she is with her filthy Doc Martens on, stomping around, running that farm shop and loving it.'

Like the show's farmhands, Lisa is not one to be cowed by the bombastic presenter in the show. In one scene she gives him short shrift when she discovers that rather than a pond to attract more animal life to the farm, Clarkson has, in fact, created a muddy quagmire.

'What the f*** are you doing up here?' she erupts. 'It's a wetland area,' retorts Clarkson.

'Holy s***, Jeremy! What are you gonna do with all this soil? Nothing's going to come and live here!' she responds. She also witnessed both the moment Clarkson gets stung on the bottom by a bee, and when a truculent sheep catches him with a well-aimed kick to the groin.