Raine, Countess Spencer was born September 1929, the only child of the celebrated romance novelist Dame Barbara Cartland and her first husband, Alexander (Sachie) McCorquodale , an Army officer who was an heir to a printing fortune.
She married 1st, in 1947 (divorced 1976), Hon. Gerald Humphrey Legge , later 9th Earl of Dartmouth . They had four children.
Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, married 2nd, at Caxton Hall, London, England, July 14, 1976, Edward Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer. Deeply unpopular with her stepchildren, who included Diana, Princess of Wales, she was ridiculed by them and other family members as "Acid Raine" and her time at Althrop , the Spencer family seat -- a period that saw the ancestral house operatically redecorated and treasures sold -- dismissed as the "Raine of Terror." The earl died in 1992.
Raine, Countess Spencer, married 3rd, in 1993 (divorced 1995), Jean-François Pineton, Comte de Chambrun , a descendant of the marquis de La Fayette and a member of a prominent French family related to the presidential Roosevelts. Son of Jean-Pierre Pineton de Chambrun (a deaf biochemist-artist marquis) and a great-grandson of Ohio heiress Maria Longworth Storer Nichols (the founder of Rookwood Pottery ), he was previously married to Josalee Douglas , an American debutante, who was a first cousin of Princess Margaret intimate Sharman Douglas. Chambrun's courtship of the widowed Lady Spencer lasted 33 days before they married. Upon the couple's divorce, Countess de Chambrun chose to reclaim her previous style of Raine, Countess Spencer.
Lady Spencer is a member of the board of directors of Harrod's, the department store.
