Irene was just 16 when she left her small town home in Canada alone with $250 in her pocket. She was off to study the opera.
It turned out to be a remarkable journey, totally unlike anything she expected. In England, she befriended Moura Budberg who may have been a Russian spy, or an English one, or perhaps Estonian who introduced her to movie mogul Sir Alexander Korda, a man 37 years older whom she married, becoming fabulously wealthy. Her circle of friends included Winston Churchill, Brendan Bracken, and Lord Beaverbrook, Lawrence Olivier, Vivian Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, and numerous other actors and actresses, the authors Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham and others as well as several screenwriters. She was introduced to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. One evening she had dinner with Sir Anthony Eden and Lester Pearson, the future Prime Minister of Canada and Nobel Peace Prize winner. All this before she was 24 years old.
When Sir Alex died, she married David Metcalfe, a member of the Curzon family and they had three children. David's father had been the best friend of a king, his grandfather the Viceroy of India and an aunt the wife of the British Fascist, Oswald Mosley.
But, when she was only 37, she died under strange circumstances. Was it an accident? Suicide? Manslaughter?