Thelma Furness, Viscountess Furness

Thelma Furness, Viscountess Furness (née Morgan, 23 August 1904 – 29 January 1970), was a mistress of Edward VIII while he was Prince of Wales. She was supplanted in his affections by Wallis Simpson, for whose sake Edward abdicated, becoming the Duke of Windsor. She was the maternal aunt of the writer, fashion designer, and socialite Gloria Vanderbilt.

During most of Furness's relationship with the Prince of Wales, she was married to British nobleman Marmaduke Furness, 1st Viscount Furness. They married in 1926 and divorced in 1933, the year before Thelma's relationship with the Prince of Wales ended.

Furness's first name was pronounced in Spanish fashion as "TEL-ma".

Born in Lucerne, Switzerland, Thelma Morgan was a daughter of Harry Hays Morgan Sr. (1860–1933), an American diplomat who was U.S. consul in Buenos Aires and in Brussels, and his half-Chilean, half-Irish-American wife, Laura Delphine Kilpatrick (1869–1956). Married in 1893, they were divorced in 1927.

Morgan's maternal grandfather was a Union general, Hugh Judson Kilpatrick (1836–1881), who was also U.S. minister to Chile, and through her maternal grandmother Luisa Fernandez de Valdivieso (1836–1926), who was a niece of Crescente Errázuriz Valdivieso, Archbishop of Santiago, she reportedly was a descendant of Spain's Royal House of Navarre.

Thelma Morgan had two sisters: Gloria (her identical twin, the mother of Gloria Vanderbilt, the fashion designer, artist and mother of news anchor Anderson Cooper) and Laura Consuelo Morgan (aka Tamar), who was married to three men in succession: Count Jean de Maupas du Juglart (a French nobleman); Benjamin Thaw Jr. of Pittsburgh; and Alfons B. Landa, president of Colonial Airlines and vice-chairman of the finance committee of the Democratic National Committee in 1948. Thelma Morgan also had a brother, Harry Hays Morgan Jr., who became a diplomat and then a minor Hollywood actor in such films as Abie's Irish Rose (1946) and Joan of Arc (1948). Her half-siblings, from her father's first marriage to Mary E. Edgerton, were Constance Morgan (1887–1892) and Gladys "Margaret" Morgan (1889–1958).

For a very brief time, Furness was a motion picture producer and actress, after founding Thelma Morgan Pictures in 1923. As she told Time magazine, "I am incorporating the Thelma Morgan Pictures, Inc., with $100,000 capital and will produce big, sane, and sound 'specials.' I will be my own star. Hitherto, my chief experience has been in Junior League shows." Her first starring role, in 1923, was the lead in a film Aphrodite, produced by her own company and filmed at Vitagraph Studios.

Furness described her leading role in Aphrodite to The New York Times as that of "an American girl, brought up under the sinister influence of an old Egyptian woman." She also had small parts in the films Enemies of Women (1923), a William Randolph Hearst production whose cast included Lionel Barrymore and Clara Bow, So This Is Marriage? (1924), and Any Woman (1925).