It is often said that fact is stranger than fiction and no more so than the astonishing life of Elizabeth Montagu – THE HONOURABLE REBEL. This feisty, impulsive, seductive, loving, interesting and interested, quick witted and intellectual woman, born an aristocrat, needed to spread her wings. The birth of her younger brother Edward (the recently deceased 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu) gave her that freedom. After a period on the London West End stage, she spent much of the 1930s studying music in Switzerland, becoming a fine pianist, travelling across Europe and developing her fluency in German, French and Italian. During this time she met many leading writers, artists and musicians of the period. Her affairs were many and intensely private. She witnessed the rise of Nazism at that time. At the outbreak of war, she drove an ambulance in France, but when the British evacuated in June 1940, Elizabeth astonished her family by staying behind. Her dramatic escape through France, chased by the Gestapo, forms a gripping second act of the film. In Switzerland she became a secret agent, working for Britain and America and once again in danger. Amongst others she helped de-brief a top Nazi double agent intimately involved in the plot to kill Hitler. After the war the socially aware Sir Alexander Korda jumped at the chance to employ such a fascinating aristocrat with great linguistic qualities. “The Third Man” and “An Ideal Husband” were two of the many films on which she worked. The death of her great love, the celebrated classical pianist Renata Borgatti, was followed by her marriage to Colonel Arthur Varley and a new and fascinating chapter in her life began. Music, along with Beaulieu, was the greatest of her loves. She served as an assistant to Toscanini during his visits to London in 1937-8; helped Walter Legge found the Philharmonia Orchestra; was a member of Benjamin Britten's English Opera Group and was particularly proud of her libretto for Rolf Liebermann's ‘School for Wives’ and Paul Burkhard's 'Oh My Papa!'. Elizabeth Montagu died in 2002 back home at her beloved Beaulieu. Her ashes are buried in the family burial ground in the 900-year-old Abbey there. Unlike Downton this one is real.

• published: 11 Nov 2015
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