Nancy wake movie#

In 1939 Nancy, married a handsome wealthy French industrialist, Henri Fiocca, in Marseilles (apparently seduced by his proficency in tango). The sight fed an early determination to work against the Nazis and eventually led to her courageous role in the French resistance. In Vienna she saw horrific Dantescan scenes: Jews chained to a massive wheels, rolled around the streets and whipped by Nazi stormtroopers in a city square. In 1930s Europe she witnessed the rise of Hitler, Nazism and anti-Semitism. 'I've always got on very well with the French, perhaps because I'm very natural.' It was a glamorous life of parties and travel, and she lived it to the full. Wake used the money to travel to London and then to Europe where she worked as a journalist, swinging with a cosmopolitan set of independent and carefree young people. Then an aunt in New Zealand sent her £200 – a princely sum in those days. He sold our house from under us and we were kicked out.' Wake ran away from home at 16 and went to work as a nurse.

Nancy wake movie#

He went to New Zealand to make a movie about the Maoris, and he never came back. 'I adored my father,' Wake recently told the Sunday Times, sitting on her bar stool with a walking stick in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. Wake was raised without affection by her embittered mother after her father had walked out on them. 'I was a loner and I had a good imagination.' She was a rebel, in particular shunning her mother's strict religious beliefs. She was much younger than her brothers and sisters, and strongly independent. When Nancy was 20 months old, her parents moved to Sydney where she grew up, chafing under the confines of genteel society. He was a dapper dresser who never seemed to have a worry in the world.'

'Young Nancy's father, Charles, however, was of solid English stock…an extremely good-looking, tall man of easy, extroverted charisma and enormous warmth, he was a journalist/editor by trade, then working on a Wellington newspaper. In sum, Ella's people went a long, long way back in New Zealand, and physically she was like the land itself, rustically beautiful. Legend has it that the great Maori chieftain, Hone Heke, had loved Pourewa himself and had sworn death to them both, but had been killed in the Maori Wars before fulfilling his threat. She had been the first of her race to marry a white man, in the person of Nancy's English great-grandfather Charles Cossell, and they were wed by the Reverend William Williams at Waimate Mission Station on 26 October, 1836. 'Ella Rosieur Wake came from an interesting ethnic mix, her genetic pool bubbling with material from the Huguenots, the French Protestants who had famously fled France so they could pursue their religion freely, and Maori, as her English great-grandmother had been a Maori maiden by the name of Pourewa. The biography Nancy Wake, by Australian journalist and rugby personality Peter Fitzsimons, strongly records her edge lineage: Nancy Wake was born in the gusty heights of Roseneath, Wellington, New Zealand, on 13 August 1912 to Charles Augustus and Ella Rosieur Wake, the youngest of six children. With a roar that makes both her name and nickname seem quaintly ironic this is Nancy at 89: 'Somebody once asked me, 'Have you ever been afraid?' … Hah! I've never been afraid in my life.' The Sunday Times (South Africa) describes her as a real-life Charlotte Gray 'whose exploits with the French Resistance make Sebastian Faulks's fictional Charlotte Gray – on which the film version has been based – read like an Enid Blyton girls' school frolic.' Young Rebel Her story is one of daring, courage and optimism in the face of impossible odds. She became a saboteur, organiser and Resistance fighter who led an army of 7,000 Maquis troops in guerrilla warfare to sabotage the Nazis. When war broke out she was a young woman married to a wealthy Frenchman living a life of luxury in cosmopolitan Marseilles. They code-named her 'The White Mouse' because of her ability to elude capture. Nancy Wake was the Allies' most decorated servicewoman of WWII, and the Gestapo's most-wanted person.