Margery Booth: The Forgotten Poppy
Margery Booth is a forgotten English Opera Star from the 1930s. She rose to great fame in Hitlers 3rd Reich, singing at the Berlin Opera until she was finally arrested in 1945. A personal favourite of Hitler, she was also a British Intelligence Agent. Surviving the Gestapo, the war and its dreadful conclusion in Berlin, as well as a traumatic escape across Germany, she gave evidence at war-trials in London.
Largely ignored by her peers after the war, who despite everything, believed her to have been a Nazi-sympathiser, she eventually died from throat cancer in 1952 and was to a great extent, forgotten - until now.
Centred around interviews with the only living person known to have met her, the script writer for an up-coming feature film on the subject and the daughter of a fellow spy, and using actual news-reel with some dramatic reconstruction, The Forgotten Poppy briefly traces her life from the back-streets of Wigan through the rise and fall of Berlin, to her tragic death in New York.
Interviews
Ralph Harvey
Wendy Haskell
John Woodforde
Reconstruction
Margery Booth - Meryn Turner
Voiceovers
Narrator - Yvonne Maxwell
Voice of Margery - Amy Enticknap
Voice of William Fairhurst - Steve Bannister
Crew
DoP - Nathan Greenwood
Camera Assistant/Researcher - Ian Yarwood
Producer - Steve Bannister
Executive Producer - Frank Tuscany
Special Thanks
Vintage Rooms, Wimborne Minster
Soundworks Oxford
Museum of Wigan Life
Thame Players Theatre
Oxford Castle
Rushden Transport Museum & Railway
Sharnbrook Mill Theatre Trust
Mike Tree
Chiara Pincelli
Colleen Tudway
Alex McKenzie
Doug Pope
John Sugars