'She is the most feminine woman I know, until the fighting starts. Then she is like five men.' Nancy grew up in Australia. After working as a nurse, she left for Europe and a career in journalism, seeing at first hand the persecution of the Jews in Austria.

In 1939, she married a wealthy man and settled in Marseilles but, once the war was under way, soon started organising escape routes over the Pyrenees. The 'White Mouse' was eventually followed by the Gestapo, and she took her own route out of France to London. Her husband was left behind but he refused to betray her and was tortured and executed.

Nancy joined SOE for training. She missed one course and, said a friend, 'they sent her on another course with only men and no women around, and she was in her element'.

When she was dropped into the Auvergne, her parachute stuck in a tree. Her agent said he hoped all trees could bear such beautiful fruit. Nancy told him not to give her 'that French shit'. Soon she was leading 7,000 men. She led a section of 10 men against a machine-gun post, using a bazooka and pistol, and brought all of them safely home.

She stormed Gestapo headquarters with grenades and felled a sentry with a fatal karate chop. Hardest of all, she rode several hundred kilometres over 71 hours on a bicycle to deliver vital messages.

Nancy Wake was admired and respected by her fighters. She mocked a later film which showed her cooking breakfast for them: 'There wasn't an egg to be had for love nor money and even if there had been, why would I be frying it when I had men to do that sort of thing?'

After the war she eventually returned to Australia and was the most highly decorated Australian - but she has never received a medal from her home country. Now she says that if they did offer her such an honour, 'they can stick their award and be thankful it's not a pineapple'.

She hopes to go down in history as the woman who turned down 7,000 sex-starved Frenchmen, and says: 'I got away with blue murder and loved every minute of it.'