French agent and spy for the United Kingdom’s clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France during the Second World War, Odette Sansom is also known as Odette Churchill and Odette Hallowes, code named Lise. Born in France, she met an Englishman, Roy Patrick Sansom in Boulogne and married him in Boulogne-sur-Mer on 27 October 1931, moving with him to Britain. The couple had three daughters: Françoise Edith, born 1932 in Boulogne; Lili M, born 1934 in Fulham; and Marianne O, born 1936 in Fulham. Sansom arrived in France on 2 November 1942 and worked as a courier with the Spindle network (or circuit) of SOE headed by Peter Churchill. In January 1943, to evade arrest, Churchill and Sansom moved their operations to near Annecy in the French Alps. She and Churchill were arrested there on 16 April 1943 by spy-hunter Hugo Bleicher. She spent the rest of the war imprisoned in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.
Roy and Odette’s marriage was dissolved in 1946 and she married Peter Churchill in 1947.
In 1955, she co-founded the annual Women of the Year Lunch with Tony Lothian and Lady Georgina Coleridge (journalist and Marquess of Tweeddale).
She was divorced from Churchill in 1956 and married Geoffrey Hallowes, a former SOE officer, in the same year.
She died on 13 March 1995 at age 82 in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England.
Link to Wikipedia biography