The beautiful and sexually adventurous Krystyna Skarbek, dubbed “Churchill’s favorite spy,” was celebrated for her daring WWII exploits in Nazi-occupied Europe.
She is said to have inspired both the James Bond characters Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with love and Vesper Lynd in two different versions of Casino Royale – played by Ursula Andress and Eva Green.
Now a film is being made about Krystyna’s extraordinary life – and death – that will bring her wartime exploits to a wider audience for the first time.
Morgane Polanski, daughter of controversial director Roman, plays Krystyna alongside Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell, and filming concludes this week with a spectacular battle scene in Poland’s Radkowski Skaly Mountains.
Dubbed ‘The Partisan’, the film saw the local town of Bystrzyca transform Klodska into a replica of the French town of Crest, with nearly every shop looking like small wartime provincial establishments and numerous extras from around the region.
The beautiful and sexually adventurous Krystyna Skarbek (pictured), dubbed “Churchill’s favorite spy,” was celebrated for her daring WWII exploits in Nazi-occupied Europe
She is said to have inspired both the James Bond characters Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with love and Vesper Lynd in two different versions of Casino Royale – played by Ursula Andress and Green
Executive producer George Byczynski said of Krystyna, “She was the bravest of the brave.”
Born into an aristocratic but poverty-stricken Polish family in 1908, Krystyna was the British’s first female constable to serve in the field and the longest-serving of all wartime British female constables.
After Poland was overrun by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939, Krystyna worked for the Special Operations Executive under the pseudonyms Christine Granville and Pauline Armand throughout the war.
At the outbreak of hostilities, she traveled to Britain with her then-husband and joined the Secret Intelligence Service, who described her as “absolutely fearless.”
Her success is said to have influenced the organization’s decision to recruit more women as agents in Nazi-occupied countries.
By the time WWII broke out, Krystyna was on her second marriage and had had a succession of lovers, according to author Clare Mulley in “The Spy Who Loved.” Many more would follow.
Born into an aristocratic but poverty-stricken Polish family in 1908, Krystyna was the British’s first female constable to serve in the field and the longest-serving of all wartime British female constables.
Resistance fighters near Savournon, Hatues-Alpes in August 1944. SOE agents are second from right, Krystyna Skarbek, third John Rroper, fourth Robert Purvis
According to the book, “Men went crazy for Christine, and she wasn’t the monogamous type. She jumped into bed with almost everyone she met.”
Her longest and most serious war relationship was with Andrzej Kowerski, a one-legged Polish war hero. But she also had an affair with his good friend, another Polish war hero Wladimir Ledóchowski.
Other lovers included a married SOE colleague with whom she parachuted into occupied France – and then jumped into bed – as well as becoming a “very special friend” of a mountaineer in the Alps.
Her most famous achievement in Nazi-occupied France came after D-Day, when she saved two SOE agents from the Gestapo hours before they were due to be shot by threatening and bribing the Gestapo leader en masse.
Aware that the war was drawing to a close, he agreed and the men walked free. A fictionalized version of the event from the 1980s TV series ‘Wish me luck’, about female SOE agents.
She even skied over the Czechoslovak mountains into occupied Poland in one of her first clandestine operations.
She even skied over the Czechoslovak mountains into occupied Poland in one of her first clandestine operations
Other missions included conducting surveillance and liaising with partisan groups. For her heroic deeds, Krystyna was awarded the George Medal, the OBE and France’s Croix de Guerre.
She also undertook espionage missions in Cairo, Syria, Lebanon, Budapest and Turkey.
After the war, she saw no future in Poland, where a Soviet-backed communist regime had been installed and taken jobs in Britain before she was murdered by a lover in a seedy hotel in Earl’s Court in 1952.
But the post-war years were less good for her.
She was rejected from various military jobs, dismissed as a “dumb girl,” MI6 documents show, and forced to make a living as a Harrods hat inspector, a toilet cleaner on the third class sections of cruise ships, and as a waitress . .
In June 1952, she was living in cheap lodgings in Earl’s Court, where an obsessed and jealous ex-lover Dennis Muldowney stabbed her to death with a commando knife.
He was hanged weeks later after admitting to the crime.
After her death, six of the men who had been her wartime lovers met in a London club to celebrate her.
She is buried in London’s Kensal Green under a layer of soil bought by friends from what was then communist Poland.
She is buried in London’s Kensal Green under a layer of soil bought by friends from what was then communist Poland
She had no children, but after a long campaign a blue memorial plaque has been erected outside the hotel in Lexham Gardens where she was murdered.
Spymaster Vera Atkins of the SOE later described her as “very brave, very attractive, but a loner and a law unto herself.”
Mr Bryczynski added: ‘Her father was a Polish nobleman and Catholic, her mother was Jewish and she was the first woman to work in the field for the British Special Operations Executive.
“I am very proud that her story will be immortalized on the big screen, as a symbol of the struggle for freedom and a bold stance against tyranny.”
For many decades after Skarbek’s assassination in 1952, there was a conspiracy of silence.
Her friends, lovers, and colleagues wouldn’t reveal much about her life because she was a spy. Only in recent years has her story become popular and many secrets have come to light.’
‘The Partisan’ is made with the help of the Polish Film Institute.