ANGELA LAMBERTAngela Lambert, who died on 26 September, 2007, aged 67, successfully walked the well-trodden but never smooth path from journalism to fiction.The most successful of her seven novels, A Rather English Marriage, was adapted by Andrew Davies into a critically-acclaimed television drama for the BBC, starring those rather English actors Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley.Her journalistic career included spells at The Sun, Independent, Sunday Telegraph and Daily Mail, and broadcasting on ITN, LWT and Thames Television. She also wrote two non-fiction books on British society and a biography of Eva Braun.Angela Maria Helps was born on 14 April, 1940, to a civil servant and German-born housewife in Sussex. She was a sensitive and withdrawn child and was sent away to boarding school at an early age, an experience she described as like "being dumped by unfeeling parents". She determined that she should be a writer at the age of 12.At the all-female St Hilda's College, Oxford, she studied politics, philosophy and economics and thrived in the company of other young, creative people. There she met Martin Lambert, a month before her finals. The couple married in 1962.She had a few odd jobs before starting her career as a journalist at Modern Woman magazine. However, with no sense of irony, the publication sacked her when she became pregnant. Between 1964 and 1967 she worked as private secretary to the controversial politician Lord Longford.In 1967 her husband abandoned her with their son and daughter. Nevertheless she was grateful that her birth date meant she was a 20-something throughout most of the 1960s since "it meant that I was one of the first wave of women to benefit from the Pill, feminism and equal (if still far from perfect) opportunities."In 1969 she started work for ITN and had spells with London Weekend Television and Thames Television before moving to print and joining the newly formed Independent in 1988. There she built a reputation as an adept interviewer and also wrote comment pieces, book reviews, travel articles and profiles.However, in 1979 she had been diagnosed with a high blood pressure condition and this forced her to take time away from journalism. She used this time to begin researching and writing history. In 1982 Unquiet Souls was published and nominated for the Whitbread Prize. She followed it up with 1939: The Last Season of Peace in 1989.Both books dealt with issues of the English class system and this would form the basis of her fiction. She saw a correlation between class snobbery and the social and sexual pressures of modern society, which she explored in her first novels, Love Among the Single Classes (1989) and No Talking After Lights (1990).A Rather English Marriage (1992) revolves around two ex-service men from different backgrounds who are widowed on the same day and form an allegiance which begins to strain when their class division comes to the fore. The TV film, screened in 1998, won four BAFTA awards and was nominated for a further two.She left the Independent in 1995 but continued to work as a journalist in print and on radio, and she wrote several more novels. Her last book, The Lost Life of Eva Braun was published in 2006.She had suffered from portal hypertension, multiple immune disorders, hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver and had become increasingly disabled in her last few years.She had a second daughter from a relationship with Hungarian writer Stephen Vizinczey and in 1986 settled down with television director Tony Price, living between London and France. She was survived by Mr Price, her three children and six grandchildren.
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