Garret Wellesley, 7th Earl Cowley (30 July 1934 – 17 June 2016), was an English-American banker.
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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. His paternal grandparents were Henry Wellesley, 3rd Earl Cowley, and his first wife, Lady Violet Nevill (daughter of William Nevill, 1st Marquess of Abergavenny).
He graduated from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1957 and received an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1962.
