My mother, Margarita Luzzatto, who has died aged 86, was an interpreter and model who built a house on Paxos and translated a history of that Greek island.
She was born in Danzig (now Gdańsk) where her father, Giorgio, who managed two coal mines, was a vocal objector to Adolf Hitler’s regime. Escaping the Nazi advance in 1939, the family fled to Vienna and then Switzerland, finally reaching London, but her parents separated and her mother Hedy (nee Gabrielski) stayed in Vienna and remarried.
Margarita and her younger brother, Claude, later a fashion photographer, lived in London during the blitz. After attending junior schools in Richmond and Hampstead, and St Catherine’s school in Twickenham, Margarita began work as an agency interpreter in French and German. One assignment after the war was translating for former RAF and Luftwaffe pilots, notably the aces Robert Stanford Tuck and Adolf Galland, who met regularly in a pub in Sussex to share their experiences and talk about the politics behind wartime decisions.
Adventure was never far away – a photo of her at the wheel of a speedboat in 1949 hinted at clandestine cross-Channel activities. She claimed as one of her postwar acquaintances the safe-cracking playboy Eddie Chapman, known as Zigzag from his role as a rogueish wartime double agent.
Suspending languages work for a while, she worked for many years as a photographic and catwalk model in London – at little more than five feet tall she was nicknamed the Shrimp – and anglicised her name to Marguerite Lynd. Her sultry looks brought work as a film extra, ending with a career highlight as a walk-on in a Richard Greene swashbuckler.
In 1950 she married the scriptwriter Bill Strutton, a former PoW and Australian expat, who created the giant ant-like Zarbi for Doctor Who. After the dissolution of that marriage in 1961, and of a second in 1971 to the film historian Roger Holman, she returned to occasional interpreting work, this time for the Foreign Office, while also working as a secretary for the Royal College of Surgeons.
At 59 she set out for Paxos, where after 20 happy years she undertook the translation of a tome on the natural history of Paxos and Antipaxos by Archduke Ludwig Salvator, a triumph of clarity over the difficulty of arcane, late 19th-century Viennese prose. Taking nearly four years, this labour of love produced a popular coffee table book.
Margarita is survived by Claude, her two children, Mark and me, and by three granddaughters and two grandsons.
