[1] He was the son of actor Arthur Wellesley, 4th Earl Cowley (1890–1962), and his second wife, Mary Elsie Himes (1906–2003).
His parents met while his mother "was working as a hat check girl at a road house near Reno" and was divorced from Joseph T. Himes of San Francisco three weeks before their wedding.
[7] He graduated from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1957 and received an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1962.
[8] He continued to work in finance as group vice-president with Bank of America in London, between 1978 and 1985 and then as independent financial advisor between until 1990 before becoming an investment partner with Thomas R. Miller & Son in Bermuda.
"[8] After the death of his third wife in 2008, Lord Cowley married Carola Marion Stormonth (née Erskine-Hill) Darling (born 1943) on 15 February 2012.