Princess george galitzine biography of williams

From joining a top secret female espionage team during World War Two to modelling for Dior, Vogue and Balenciaga, her life was a heady mix of intrigue and glamour right to the end. 

Princess George Galitzine - the last supermodel of the 1950s - passed away in London last week, leaving an impressive legacy of charity work, acting, modelling and even advising M&S on fashion. 

Known as Jean Dawnay in the '50s, she went on to marry Prince George Galitzine from one of the noblest families in Imperial Russia - a direct descendant of Catherine the Great. 

But despite her breathtaking array of achievements, the former Jean Mary Dawnay came from humble beginnings. 

Born in Brighton in 1925, the daughter of a clerk at a meat importers and a pianist, she encountered tragedy at an early age when her mother died when she was four.

As her father was unable to look after her alone, she was put into foster care.

When World War Two broke out, she lied to get into the WAAF, claiming she was 18-years-old and after a stint in a parachute factory she moved to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry where she joined a top secret all-female espionage unit.

She was posted to Bletchley Park where she worked as a cipher expert with the famous codebreaker Leo Marks, who described her as on of his 'very best'. 

After the war ended, she admits that she initially had 'no idea of what I wanted out of life, except a restless ambition to be famous—at what, I didn’t know'. 

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Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers about events related to the upcoming limited series Mary & George.

Penniless after the death of her first husband in 1606 and with four children to support, Englishwoman Mary Villiers desperately searched for a way to turn her family’s fortune around. Her radical solution—to infiltrate the court and personal life of King James I—would catapult Mary and her second son, George, to the center of the English monarchy and earn them a rather notorious reputation throughout history.

Their mother-son scheme forms the basis of the aptly named Starz miniseries Mary & George. Adapted from author Benjamin Woolley’s 2017 nonfiction book The King’s Assassin, the seven-episode drama premieres Friday and stars Academy Award–winner Julianne Moore as Mary and Nicholas Galitzine as her son George, the First Duke of Buckingham.

In what could be described as an extreme case of helicopter parenting, the series explores how Mary helped her son manipulate the king for their family’s own benefit—with George gaining plenty of property and prestige along the way. Eventually, though, his outspokenness caught up to him with unintended consequences.

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Mary was eager to provide for her children

Although Mary eventually became a major part of the king’s circle, her early life was much less noteworthy. Believed to have been born in 1570, Mary was the daughter of a Leicester squire named Anthony Beaumont. With little money or status, she began working as a waiting woman—essentially, a personal servant—to a richer relative in her teenage years. It was during this time she married her first husband, a sheep farmer named George Villiers who was also her cousin.

George, who already had six children from his first marriage, had four mo

PRINCE EMANUEL GALATZINE

Among all the upper-class personalities in the wartime RAF, Prince Emanuel Galitzine occupies a place of his own. A Russian emigrant, he was no less than a great-grandson of Emperor Paul I, himself a son of Catherine the Great. His mother was a daughter of Duke George Alexander of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Galitzine was born in the declining tsarist Russia in 1918, but soon the Bolshevik revolution forced his family to escape – under the most dramatic circumstances.

They settled in London, where Emanuel received the best of educations. Having reached the age of 21 at the outbreak of war, Galitzine began to dream of flying with the RAF. Before he made his final decision to enlist, the Soviet attack on Finland in 1940 made him convinced that he must fight the Communists who had dispossessed his family.

Having been accepted by the Finnish Air Force, he was just settling in when Mannerheim, the inspirational Finnish leader and an old friend of Galitzine’s father, told him that his mother had been killed in the London Blitz.

His return to England was an odyssey. First sent with a Finnish passport to Boston, he was refused entry to Britain. Then he went to Canada, where he was again refused help. So he signed on as an ordinary seaman with a shipping line across the Atlantic and reached Scotland, where he was promptly arrested on suspicion of being a spy. Not before Galitzine’s father who was working for British intelligence learned about his fate was he cleared. The way was finally clear for him to be commissioned into the RAFVR. He was posted in November 1941 to No. 504 Squadron in Northern Ireland.

In due course, F/O Galitzine was posted to the experimental Special Service Flight in Northolt. Disguised under this name was an experimental unit aimed at countering the threat of German pressurized high-altitude Ju 86P bombers which began to operate over Britain. The available Spitfires Mk. VI had inadequate ceiling to counter the Germans oper