The Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin presents an in-depth profile of the legendary American war reporter Martha Gellhorn. Friends and family also talk candidly about Gellhorn's career and a private life that included a marriage to Ernest Hemingway.
Director interview: Peter Williams
Peter Williams tells us how Gellhorn "broke the mould" in an all-male profession and why reporting from Dachau changed her life.
BBC Four: What attracted you to Martha Gellhorn as a documentary subject?
Peter Williams: I met her in 1987 when I made another film about her. What initially attracted me was that she seemed to me the woman who broke the mould, or formed the mould really, from which people like Marie Colvin and Kate Adie have sprung. She was the first woman war reporter of any profile at all. Secondly, her writing is incredible, as John Simpson says in the film, "She was the best." What I particularly like was her determination to say incessantly that war is grim, messy and bad and people suffer. She knew that bringing these images to a reading public at that time was the best way of trying to prevent war.
I also knew that she had been married to Hemingway and one of the interesting things about her was that she never talked about that - it was always off-limits. One of my motivations of going back again was that for someone who had been so observant about other people and their lives and deaths and their private lives - how their lives were affected by force majeure and relationships - she was so guarded about her own private life. I felt that here was an opportunity, maybe for the first time, to paint a full portrait of one of the most fascinating women of the 20th Century.
BBC Four: Which of the conflicts that she covered do you think had the most effect on her?
PW: As the film says, there were two. In my view, and having met her, I have no doubt that the Spanish Civil War was the most formative from a political point of view and the experience of going to Dachau was the most traumatic in her life. I think she emerged from the Spanish Civil War with a very clear idea of right and wrong as she saw it. I think she emerged from going to Dachau disillusioned with the human race: that people could actually do this to each other. It may be presumptuous of me to say it, but before that I think she had a belief in the essential goodness of human beings. I don't think you can underestimate the trauma of that. Again, as we say in the film, what happened to her between 1935/6 and 1945 were absolutely life-changing experiences which profoundly affected her and her viewpoint for the rest of her life.
BBC Four: What also emerges from the film is that not only did she have a long life, she also had an incredibly long career - she never tired of working...
PW: Never tired but then it was an enthusiasm based entirely on a vocational drive. She felt she was on this earth to reflect war and oppose injustice. I have the highest regard for her both as a reporter and as human being because of that. It was an absolutely unflinching, uncompromising pursuit of what she saw as her duty. It may be old fashioned to talk about duty but that's how she saw it. It was a calling. She was a driven woman and I can recognise that and wholly applaud it.
BBC Four: On the flipside of an extraordinary career was, as you've said, a fairly tumultuous private life...
PW: It's a delicate area but on the other hand it was part of the mystery of the woman that she had never talked about this at all. In one of her books she writes about a journey she made with Ernest Hemingway and simply refers to him throughout as "another". Even in those days there were folk who were prying and interested in her, especially in her relationship with Hemingway and with others. She managed to preserve her privacy to a great extent. She guarded it jealously, and as she did with most things, did it very successfully.
BBC Four: Did Marie Colvin take much persuading to present the documentary?
PW: Not at all. As we say in the film, Marie actually has a battered copy of The Face of War which she takes with her when she goes to war. That's what attracted us to her in many ways. This is the first time she's dome anything like this and the great thing for me as a producer/director is that I didn't have to tell Marie anything about Martha Gellhorn because she already knew everything.
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