Norton Knatchbull, 3rd Earl Mountbatten of Burma

Mountbatten was born in London as the eldest son of Patricia Knatchbull, 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma and John Knatchbull, 7th Baron Brabourne.

Mountbatten was educated at the Dragon School, in Oxford, and Gordonstoun School, Elgin, Moray, Scotland. He subsequently attended the University of Kent in southeast England.

He followed his father into the British film industry in the 1970s, working as location manager on A Bridge Too Far and associate producer of Death on the Nile and the television serial Quatermass.[1]

On the death of his father on 23 September 2005, he became Baron Brabourne, of Brabourne in the County of Kent, in the peerage of the United Kingdom. He also succeeded to the title of Baronet Knatchbull, of Mersham Hatch in the County of Kent, in the baronetage of England. On the death of his mother on 13 June 2017, he became Earl Mountbatten of Burma, also a title in the peerage of the United Kingdom created for his grandfather, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India.

He is a descendant of Queen Victoria, whose second daughter Princess Alice of the United Kingdom was his maternal great-great-grandmother. He is also a second cousin to Charles, Prince of Wales through his mother and Charles' father, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Prince Philip is also his godfather and he in turn is a godfather of Philip's grandson, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge.

Mountbatten married Penelope Meredith Eastwood[2] (born 16 April 1953), a daughter of Reginald Wray Frank Eastwood (1912–1980), a self-made millionaire who began his working life as a butcher at 15 and founded the Angus Steakhouse chain,[3] and his wife Marian Elizabeth Hood (b. 1928), on 20 October 1979 at Romsey Abbey, Romsey, in Hampshire, where his parents were married in 1946, only two months after the bomb attack committed by the IRA which killed his grand-father, Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the Earl's younger brother, Nicholas Knatchbull, and his 83-year-old grandmother, Doreen Knatchbull, Baroness Brabourne.

The family home is Broadlands, also in Hampshire.

The 3rd Earl Mountbatten of Burma and his wife had three children and two grandchildren:

• Nicholas Louis Charles Norton Knatchbull, Lord Brabourne[4] (born 15 May 1981)
• Lady Alexandra Victoria Edwina Diana Knatchbull (born 5 December 1982), married on 25 June 2016 to Thomas Hooper, CEO of Third Space Learning. They have two children:
  • Inigo Norton Sebastian Mountbatten Hooper (born 21 December 2017)
  • Alden Peter Theodore Mountbatten Hooper (born 27 March 2020)
• The Hon. Leonora Louise Marie Elizabeth Knatchbull (25 June 1986 – 22 October 1991). She died of kidney cancer, and is buried in the grounds of the family home, Broadlands; see Leonora Children's Cancer Fund.

• Marlene A. Eilers, Queen Victoria's Descendants (Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1987), page 184.

• "The Mountbattens". Broadlands.net. Archived from the original on 18 February 2010.

• "Classiebawn and the Assassination of Lord Mountbatten at Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo; History, Heritage, Irish Folklore, and News from County Sligo, Ireland". Sligoheritage.com. Retrieved 28 March 2017.
• Norton Knatchbull on IMDb