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Barbara Amiel

The Right Honourable
The Lady Black of Crossharbour
Barbara Amiel at the 2013 CFC Annual Gala & Auction.jpg
Personal details
Born Barbara Joan Estelle Amiel
(1940-12-04) 4 December 1940 (age 76)
Watford, Hertfordshire, England
Nationality British
Spouse(s) Gary Smith (1964–1964)
George Bloomfield (1965–1971)
George Jonas (1974–1979)
David Graham (1984–1988)
Conrad Black (1992–present)
Residence Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Palm Beach, Florida, US
London, England
Education University of Toronto
Occupation Writer, columnist, socialite
Known for Wife of Conrad Black
Salary $1.1 million (1997–2003)
Religion Jewish

Barbara Joan Estelle Amiel, Baroness Black of Crossharbour (born 4 December 1940) is a British journalist, writer, and socialite. She is the wife of former media baron Conrad Black.

Amiel was born into a Jewish family in Watford, Hertfordshire, England, the daughter of Vera Isserles (née Barnett) and Harold Joffre Amiel. Her parents divorced when she was eight, after her father left her mother for another woman. Her mother subsequently remarried and in November 1952, the couple emigrated with Barbara, her sister and half-brother, to Hamilton, Ontario. Her father committed suicide in 1956.

While in England, Amiel attended North London Collegiate School in Canons Park, Harrow, Greater London, an independent girls' school. Family difficulties — including some financial hardship — during the early years in Canada, precipitated her living independently for periods of time during her adolescence during which she held a variety of jobs to support herself. In 1959, she entered the University of Toronto, where she attended University College and took a degree in Philosophy and English. Amiel was an active communist, and was a delegate in 1962 to the Soviet-organised World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland.

Amiel entered a brief marriage to Gary Smith in 1964 when she was 23 years old. Her second marriage was to George Bloomfield from 1965 to 1971. Her third marriage was to poet, broadcaster and author George Jonas from 1974 to 1979. A fourth marriage was to cable businessman David Graham in 1984, but they were divorced by 1988.

In July 1992, she married Conrad Black (who was granted, in 2001, a life peerage as Lord Black of Crossharbour), a Canadian mining and media baron. Black renounced his Canadian citizenship to accept the peerage. He was convicted of mail fraud and obstruction of justice in 2007. Amiel stood by her husband throughout the lengthy trial and afterwards.

Amiel has been a longtime columnist for Maclean's magazine (1977–present) noted for her conservative political views. In the late 1960s Amiel was a story editor and on-camera presence for CBC TV Public Affairs. In the 1970s she was intermittently on contract with both CTV and TV Ontario. By Persons Unknown: The Strange Death of Christine Demeter (1978), which she co-authored with her third husband, won The Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime book. She was a columnist for the Toronto Sun in the 1980s and 1990s, also serving as the daily's editor from 1983 until 1985 (making her the first female to edit a daily metropolitan newspaper in Canada) before returning to Britain.


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