The Baroness - Tapa dura

The fascinating, intimately told story of the wild and romantic life of Pannonica Rothschild, which moves from London to Africa during World War II and finally to the post-war jazz world of New York City. Through interviews with her relatives and access to family documents, Hannah Rothschild has pieced together the life of her extraordinary great-aunt. She describes Nica's early years in her family's tradition-bound Sir Christopher Wren-designed home, Tring Park in Hertfordshire, and at 148 Piccadilly in London, where footmen were behind every chair and Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein were frequent guests. We see Nica enter the deb circuit, her early marriage to Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, the birth of their five children, and life at their chateau in France. We follow her escape from the Nazis and work in Africa with her husband, who was part of the Allied Defensive; and that moment in the 1950s, when, after hearing the piece"'Round Midnight," she leaves her marriage and moves to New York in search of Thelonious Monk, living out the rest of her life as a music manager and patroness of Monk as well as much of the New York jazz world.

HANNAH ROTHSCHILD is a writer and director whose documentaries have appeared at film festivals including Telluride and Tribeca; Working Title and Ridley Scott have optioned her original screenplays. She conceived and directed The Jazz Baroness, about her great-aunt and Thelonious Monk, broadcast by BBC and HBO in 2009.