Madeleine Masson
Madeleine Masson was born in South Africa on April 23rd, 1912 and is the Non-Fiction Author. At the age of 95, Madeleine Masson biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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Madeleine Rayner (née Levy; 23 April 1912 – 23 August 2007), known professionally as Madeleine Masson, was a South African-born English-language author of plays, film scripts, novels, memoirs and biographies.
Early life
Madeleine Masson was born Madeleine Levy in 1912 in Johannesburg to a French banker, Emile Levy, and Lili, "a ravishingly beautiful creature with Viennese antecedents". On a trip to Paris with her parents, 18-year-old Madeleine met 40-year-old Baron Renaud Marie de la Minaudière. As she put it in her autobiography, I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, "I was a small-town South African who was being offered Prince Charming on a platter, decked with yachts, châteaux, sable coats, jewels, townhouses and a coat-of-arms equal to that of the Valois."
Madeleine took her surname "Masson" from one of the Baron's subsidiary titles. While pregnant with her first child, she was informed by the Baron's mistress – from whom she had mistakenly supposed he had parted – that not only were they still linked, but it was her fortune that paid for the Baron's elegant lifestyle. Any disturbance to their relations, it was made clear, would result in withdrawal of her support.
Personal life and writing
During a trip to visit Napoleon's tomb on Saint Helena, Masson met Captain John Rayner. After a courtship, they contracted a marriage that was to last 32 years.
While running the family home in Bosham, West Sussex, England, Masson started an early public relations firm. All the while, she wrote plays, film scripts, novels, memoirs, biographies. The most famous were her autobiography and her biographies of Edwina, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, and of the celebrated SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville).
As late as spring 2007, Masson was busy revising an earlier novel about the German massacre on 10 June 1944 of the villagers of Oradour, near Limoges, France, and working on a biography of Baroness Emma Orczy, author of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Career
Masson was shocked by this revelation's inability to miscarry. She left the aristocratic life and plunged into Paris' bohemia, read history and philosophy at the Sorbonne, art at Munich, and wrote for the literary magazine Les Nouvelles littéraires. She had an affair with a South African artist Géa Augsbourg, became her lover, learned Pablo Picasso and André Breton, and met writers Colette and André Gide.
The Jewish-descended Masson left Géa Augsbourg after World War II, intending to return to South Africa. On the train ride to Bordeaux, she was persuaded to join the French Resistance. Later, she recalled this period, when she sent messages and aided in escaping, as a time of "absolute terror." She assisted Tim Buckmaster, the son of Maurice Buckmaster, in preparing a biography of his father in later years.