Sarah Churchill was a British actress and dancer of American descent, born in London in 1914 to Winston Churchill, who would later serve as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and his wife Clementine Ogilvy Hozier.
She was named after her distant ancestor Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, a prominent figure in British political history and a close friend and royal favorite of Anne, Queen of Great Britain.
Sarah's parents were part of a well-connected but somewhat disreputable line of British nobility. Her paternal grandfather, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a prominent politician who had ruined his own career in an act of political suicide in 1886 and died of syphilis in 1895.
Sarah's paternal grandmother, Jennie Jerome, was a wealthy American heiress from Brooklyn, New York, known for her extramarital affairs with several prominent men, including the future king Edward VII.
Sarah's maternal grandmother, Lady Blanche Ogilvy, was famous for her scandalous sexual life and her newsworthy divorce from military officer Henry Montague Hozier, whose paternity was disputed.
Sarah was educated at Notting Hill High School in London and later at a boarding school in Kent, North Foreland Lodge. In 1936, she married Vic Oliver, a well-known actor and comedian of Austrian-Jewish descent, without her parents' permission.
Sarah became a professional actress in the 1930s, appearing in films such as "Who's Your Lady Friend?" (1937),"He Found a Star" (1941),"Daniele Cortis" (1947),and "All Over the Town" (1949). Her most famous role was as dancer Anne Ashmond in the film "Royal Wedding" (1951).
However, Sarah's career declined due to her problems with alcoholism, and she was arrested several times for being drunk and disorderly, serving time as a prisoner at HM Prison Holloway.
In the late 1950s, Sarah started a side-career producing lithographic prints for sale, and in the 1970s, she worked with other artists to produce portraits of her father, "A Visual Philosophy of Sir Winston Churchill".
Sarah Churchill died in September 1982, two weeks prior to her 68th birthday, and was buried in a family grave at St Martin's Church, Bladon, Oxfordshire, alongside her parents and three of her siblings.
