Lady Diana Mosley, the widow of Britain's prewar fascist party leader who was imprisoned with her husband as a Nazi sympathizer and was regarded as the most beautiful and most controversial of the famous Mitford family sisters, has died. She was 93.
Mosley, who knew Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, died Monday in her flat in Paris after suffering a slight stroke a week earlier. Her death, according to the notice posted by her sister, Deborah, the duchess of Devonshire, was "peaceful."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday August 16, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 41 words Type of Material: Correction
Mosley obituary -- An obituary of Diana Mosley, a Nazi sympathizer and the widow of Britain's prewar fascist party leader, in Thursday's California section misidentified a 1985 memoir she wrote as "Love Ones." The title of the book is "Loved Ones."
Diana Mosley was an aristocrat who became known as "the most hated woman in England" during World War II.
Her second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, was founder of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and Diana gave him her full support. She traveled to Germany frequently in the 1930s and often met with Hitler.
In 1940, the Mosleys were imprisoned as national security risks. Despite continued criticism over the years, Diana Mosley never stopped championing her husband's political views and defending his reputation. He died in 1980.
And although she ultimately conceded that Hitler's actions were wrong, she never expressed regret over her friendship with Hitler, a man she found "extraordinarily fascinating and clever."
"We all know he was a monster, that he was very cruel and did terrible things," she said in a 1994 interview. "But that doesn't alter the fact that he was obviously an interesting figure. No torture on Earth would get me to say anything different."
Born Diana Freeman-Mitford on June 17, 1910, she was the fourth of seven children of David Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale, and his wife, the former Sydney Bowles.
Novelist Nancy Mitford, one of Diana's sisters, captured their sheltered and privileged upbringing -- and their eccentric relatives -- in two of her early books: "The Pursuit of Love" and "Love in a Cold Climate."
In addition to Diana, Nancy and Deborah, the other Mitford sisters included Unity, who generated controversy in the 1930s with her own pro-Hitler views; Jessica, the author, journalist and onetime Communist Party member; and the less well-known Pamela, who married a physicist. Their brother, Tom, was killed in Burma in 1945.
By all accounts, Diana was the most beautiful of an attractive group of sisters.
Author James Lees-Milne was moved to write in his diary in the late 1920s that the tall, blond and blue-eyed Diana was "a goddess, more immaculate, more perfect, more celestial than Botticelli's sea-born Venus."
