Jacqueline Du Pre

When cellist Jacqueline du Pre died in 1987 at the age of 42 the media had long since enfolded her in a cocoon of myth: over the original image of the one-time 'golden girl' with the fairytale career and storybook romance had been superimposed that of the courageous tragic heroine who never complained, who accepted her fate so gracefully that some friends, taking her most frequent expression at face value, called her Smiley - a nickname that horrified her analyst. Jacqueline du Pre, her courage notwithstanding, was neither golden girl nor saint: away from her cello, she was completely human. As a child, she had been isolated by her phenomenal talent. As an adult, she was confined to the rarefied, insular concert world. During the last fifteen years of her life, she lived in the inexorably shrinking world of the invalid.