Posted on 03/13/2003 7:13:47 PM PST by dighton
Diana de Rosso, who has died aged 82, used the cover of her career as a rising young British opera singer to work as a wartime spy.
In 1941 she was approached by French and British Intelligence, who felt that her career and her cosmopolitan upbringing made her an ideal recruit to their “private collection” of couriers and agents. In order to acquire foreign identity papers, they suggested a marriage of convenience. As luck would have it, the actor James Mason, her future brother-in-law, suggested the ideal candidate - a young Spaniard who was acting as his stand-in and desperate to remain in Britain. The marriage went ahead (and was then rapidly dissolved) and Diana de Rosso had her Spanish passport.
The next three years she spent on the move, giving song-recitals in cities across neutral Europe - Lisbon, Madrid, Stockholm, Dublin, Zurich. Usually flown in by the RAF at night, she carried secret coded information concealed within song scores, and delivered them to local agents. At the parties held after her recitals, she mingled with diplomats and agents of all nationalities, picking up, then sending back, titbits of gossip and information.
Diana de Rosso was born on August 31 1921. Her mother was Helene Ostrer, a Welsh-born bohemian who taught ballroom dancing and was at the time married to Isodore Ostrer, one of the founders of Gainsborough Films. Diana, though, was a product of a liaison between her mother and Louis de Rosso, an Italian count and inveterate gambler.
Diana was sent to boarding school at Broadstairs, Kent, but spent most of her childhood in the south of France. Although she lived with her mother and stepfather, her father figured prominently in her upbringing and she acquired a precocious familiarity with the casinos of Menton and Monte Carlo. She and her horse Onyx were painted by Walter Sickert and her remarkable soprano voice was trained by Louise Edvina, a former star of the Paris Opera.
At the outbreak of war the family moved to London, where she began giving recitals at the Wigmore Hall and sang the roles of Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor and Gilda in Rigoletto. She was never able to read a note of music, but learned her parts from memory.
After the war she studied in Milan and sang at La Scala, but by 1950, ill-health forced her to abandon an operatic career. Nonetheless, she continued to give song recitals, and, on visits behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, resumed her activities as an agent.
In 1962 Diana de Rosso gave her last public recital, at the Wigmore Hall, sharing the platform with the black singer and actor Thomas Baptiste. After the concert, she was approached by a tall man who congratulated her on her interpretation of some Spanish folk-songs. “I simpered, of course,” she recalled, “then he said, ‘You don’t know me do you?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘should I?’ ‘Well yes,’ he said, ‘I was your husband.’ Then he left and I never saw him again.”
By the 1980s, she was running Grimaldi’s, a restaurant at East Dean, Sussex; few customers forgot, or forgave, her “Grimaldi Bake”. She wrote James Mason - a personal biography and a book of memoirs, A Life of Intrigues. In 1995, she appeared in a television documentary about her wartime activities.
After the death of her younger brother Tony, Diana de Rosso lived alone with an African Grey parrot called Joe. It was following a fall while trying to catch him that she died on February 6.
She probably baked real Grimaldis.
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