Posted on 10/11/2001 8:43:58 PM PDT by dighton
IRINA BROMLEY, who has died aged 85, was born in the last days of Tsarist Russia, heiress to vast estates in Estonia conferred on her forebears by Catherine the Great, and apparently destined for a life of aristocratic privilege; the turbulence of the 20th century and her own dauntless courage ensured a more interesting outcome.
She was born Baroness Irene Isabella Margarete Paulina Caecilia von Meyendorff ex den hause Uxkull (she changed her first name to Irina when she later became a British citizen) on June 6 1916 at Reval (present day Talinn), the eldest child of Fyodor, her deeply conservative father, and Elisabeth, her passionately liberal mother.
While she was still a baby, the Bolshevik revolution drove the family into exile with only their jewellery, hidden in Irina's cot, left from their great wealth. Stoically Fyodor found work in Berlin as a vending-machine attendant and rapidly made a fortune, but Elisabeth ran off with a young poet. Irina went with them, to become immersed in the bohemian culture of Weimar Germany. It bred in her a belief in artistic freedom which melded seamlessly with the aristocratic self-confidence of her background.
Aged 18, with ambitions of becoming a wildlife photographer, she went to train at Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), the largest film studio in Germany. Unaware of her own mesmerising beauty - and her good fortune - she was outraged when a sharp-eyed casting director spotted her and offered her the lead in the film adaptation of a current best-seller. "What a dreadful suggestion," she exclaimed. "That's the sort of book our servants read."
But UFA persisted, offering her other parts, and in 1935 persuaded her to take the lead in a film called The Four from Santa Cruz. Her appeal was immediate, and subsequent roles confirmed her as such a star that she became known simply as Die Meyendorff. Her popularity was due partly to her blonde hair, blue eyes and classic good looks - "I was considered the image of the ideal German woman," she would say dismissively, "pretty, kind, stupid and faithful." Nevertheless, when she took the lead in Laurence Houseman's play Victoria Regina, which ran in Berlin from 1938 until 1940, she proved that she was also a consummate actress.
But having lost her inheritance to the Bolsheviks, she now lost the best of her career to the Nazis, who were determined to make German film and theatre vehicles of their propaganda. Everything in her family background and her bohemian upbringing was hostile to Nazi ideology. The Uxkull family to which she belonged was related to the von Stauffenbergs, and closely involved in the July plot to assassinate Hitler, and many of her friends were Jewish artists. She had no compunction in rebuffing the advances of Dr Goebbels, who as head of propaganda and ultimately of UFA was accustomed to having his pick of the studio's actresses. "You would degrade me," she said freezingly, "and you would degrade yourself."
"Unfortunately," a dejected Goebbels wrote in his diary, "Fraulein von Meyendorff seems rather cold."
More problematically, her first husband, Heinz Zahler, by whom she had a son, Andreas, born in 1940, was part of a Right-wing circle plotting to replace Hitler with a military government. An eminent doctor, Zahler specialised in mood-altering drugs; he himself was a cocaine addict. In 1941 Goering, who needed drugs to suppress his own codeine addiction, appointed him his personal physician. "Now you must kill him," Irina insisted. "You could poison him, and no one would suspect." But soon afterwards, police arrested Zahler for possessing cocaine. Alarmed that he might break down when deprived of the drug, Irina went to Goering, and persuaded him to overrule the police and order Zahler's release.
Although surveys showed her to be more popular with troops than any other film star, her unco-operative behaviour led to fewer roles, and she finished the war almost penniless, in self-imposed exile in Bavaria. Her marriage to Zahler ended in divorce, as did her second marriage.
When post-war German cinema began to struggle back to life, her career took off again with a starring role in the 1947 classic Filme ohne titel.
It was on set in 1961 that she met the Scottish actor, James Robertson Justice, best known to British audiences as Sir Lancelot Spratt of Doctor in the House and its sequels, but also a first-class naturalist who could quote poetry by the yard, and play Mahler on the piano or garden hose according to taste.
He also adored women. His wooing, in old-fashioned German learned from an ancient professor of geology, was sometimes curious, but as she confessed: "James gave me something that no German husband ever could - absolute freedom. I never had to hide from him anything that I thought or did - how could I not love him?"
Having made her decision, she left her career, house and third husband, and went to live with Justice in the highlands of Scotland where they flew falcons in the hills, dabbed for flounders in the Dornoch firth, and assembled an eclectic circle of friends including ecologists, students, writers, a Bolivian ballet dancer, an Icelandic lepidopterist, an Arab ruler, several Gaelic scholars, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales.
In 1967 Irina became a British citizen, but following his second term as rector of Edinburgh University, Justice suffered a series of strokes that prevented him working and eventually led to his bankruptcy. In growing poverty, Irina nursed him until his death in 1975.
In 1983, Justice's friend, the philanthropist and naturalist, Keith (Toby) Bromley, provided her with a home, and they later married. Together they sailed to the Arctic and the Orinoco river, supported humanitarian causes with unstinted generosity, and in their late eighties roared about the country in an open-topped, white sports car. It suited their mutually exuberant appetite for living.
She is survived by her husband, and a half-sister. Her son pre-deceased her.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2001.
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