Heygate was the son of an Eton College housemaster. He was educated at Eton and Balliol. In 1926 he went to Heidelberg as a trainee for the Foreign Office. He subsequently got a job as an assistant news editor at the BBC.

In the late 1920s Heygate was on the fringes of the group of socialites known as the "Bright Young People" and was friends with the author Anthony Powell In 1929 divorce proceedings began between Evelyn Waugh and the Honourable Evelyn Gardner (daughter of the 1st Baron Burghclere). Heygate was cited and hence was forced to resign from the BBC. In 1930 he married Gardner.

In 1932 he joined the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation and worked in collaboration with the German UFA film company at their Babelsberg Studio near Berlin. He was present at the 1935 Nuremburg rally in the company of his friend the writer Henry Williamson. In neighbouring seats were Unity Mitford, Diana Mitford and Dr. Frank Buchman.

In 1936 Heygate and Gardner divorced. In the same year he married Gaumont-British actress Gwyneth Lloyd and subsequently moved to Sussex. They had two sons, George and Richard, both of whom eventually inherited the baronetcy. Heygate and Lloyd divorced in 1947.

Heygate married a third time. By the 1970s he was living alone in Bellarena, County Londonderry. In 1976 Heygate committed suicide by shooting himself..

Books

His books comprise:

• Decent Fellows (1930), a public school novel.
• White Angel (1934)
• Talking Picture (Jonathan Cape, 1934), a semi-autobiographical novel dealing with experiences in Weimar Berlin, similar to Christopher Isherwood's I Am a Camera.
• Motor Tramp (Jonathan Cape, 1935), a factual account of tours in an MG motor car, including a visit to Nazi Germany.
• A House for Joanna (1937). A tale of life on the Sussex coast.
• These Germans: An estimate of their character seen in flashes from the drama, 1918—1939 (1940)
• Love and Death (1943)
• Kurumba (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949). Described as: A raffish, intelligent tale of a soldier and his native mistress, set in the imaginary Kurumba, somewhere on the Indian sub-continent, during the second world war.

Screenplays

Heygate is credited as a co-writer on the following films, made in Germany and staring Lilian Harvey:

• The Only Girl (Ich und die Kaiserin) (1934)
• Black Roses (Schwarze Rosen) (1935)