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7 unusual facts about Carve Her Name with Pride


Carve Her Name with Pride

Vera Atkins, Odette Sansom and Leslie Fernandez, one of Szabo's SOE instructors and a field agent himself, were advisors on the film.

The poem, 'The Life That I Have', also known as 'Yours', recited to Violette by her husband Etienne, was once believed to have been written especially for the film, but was in fact the actual code poem given to her in March 1944 by the SOE cryptographer Leo Marks, and written by him on Christmas Eve 1943 in memory of his girlfriend, Ruth, who had recently died in a car crash.

Once again, she is under Fraser's command, this time in the Limoges region.

(An uncredited Michael Caine plays the prisoner who leans forward and calls to Szabo for water; in real life, that was the war hero F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, as recorded by Leo Marks in Chapter 76 of his book Between Silk and Cyanide).

Colonel Maurice Buckmaster (played by William Mervyn) was head of SOE F Section, and Vera Atkins (played by Avice Landon) was his assistant and the section's intelligence officer, with special responsibility for female agents.

The film includes the reading of the poem The Life That I Have, written by Leo Marks and given to Szabo as she left for a mission in Nazi-occupied France.

Winterfold House

A film Carve Her Name with Pride was made in 1958 about Szabo's wartime life in the SOE.


Daniel M. Angel

responsible for several notable British films during the 1950s, such as Another Man's Poison (1952), The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954), Reach for the Sky (1956), and Carve Her Name with Pride (1958).


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