Garret Wellesley, 7th Earl Cowley

Garret Wellesley, 7th Earl Cowley (30 July 1934 – 17 June 2016), was an English-American banker.

Early life Wellesley was born in Nevada on 30 July 1934. He was the son of actor Arthur Wellesley, 4th Earl Cowley (1890–1962), and his second wife, Mary Elsie Himes (1906–2003). Before his birth, his father had sold Draycot House and the Draycot Estate in 1920, at which time it encompassed 4,320 acres. 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. In 1935, a forest fire raging over the foothills of the Sierra Nevada threatened his parents' ranch, known as Wellesley Ranch, in Lakeview, about five miles north of Carson City, Nevada.

From his father's first marriage to actress Mae Picard, he had an elder half-brother, Denis Wellesley, 5th Earl Cowley, who succeeded to their father's titles upon his death in 1962.

He graduated from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1957 and received an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1962.

Lady Elizabeth Tara Lennon Wellesley (born 1962), an artist. Garret Graham Wellesley, 8th Earl Cowley (born 1965), who co-founded the peer-to-peer lending firm Wellesley & Co.; he married Claire L. Brighton, only daughter of Peter W. Brighton of Stowbridge, in 1990.

He was married to Isabelle O'Bready of Sherbrooke, Quebec, from 1968 to 1981 and to Paige Deming, a daughter of Joseph Grove Deming of Reno, Nevada, from 1981, with whom he adopted "several daughters."

Lord Cowley died on Friday, 17 June 2016, after a short illness. His funeral was held in London and he was succeeded in the title by his son, Graham.