LLEWELYN-DAVIES Hon Melissa 1945-2025
Richard R
She was d of the LP Baron LLEWELYN-DAVIES 1912-81 and the LP Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES OF HASTOE 1915-97. She m 1974 (div) as his 1st w Christopher Desmond b 1947 a yr s of Lt-Cdr Bryan William Richard CURLING VRD RNVR b 1911 & d 1 April 2008 (DT obit 5 April) sometime head of that gentry family f/o Chilton and Elizabeth (Libby) Mary 1914-92 d of Sir Eric Henry BONHAM 3rd Bt 1875-1937 and Ethel 1881-1962 d of Lt-Col Leopold Richard SEYMOUR 1841-1904 (gt gs of 1st Marquess of HERTFORD 1718-94 and Lady Isabella FITZROY 1726-82 d of 2nd Duke of GRAFTON 1683-1757 who was gs of King CHARLES II, etc etc) and Mary Hubbard STURGIS 1851-1942, had a son and a dau.
Richard R
Melissa Llewelyn-Davies obituary: film-maker and anthropologist
Pioneer who spent two decades with a remote tribe in Kenya and made films about 1970s Britain, dies aged 79
… Llewelyn-Davies, who described herself as shy, had a plummy, feather-light voice. It was her least favourite feature — she hated how posh she sounded — but made it all the more impressive when she managed to ingratiate herself in unfamiliar places, such as the Rift Valley near the Kenya-Tanzania border, where she spent the best part of two decades befriending and understanding the warlike but highly refined tribe the Maasai.
The nine films she made of the east African tribe would cement her reputation as a pioneering anthropologist film-maker. The Maasai were illiterate and there were no written records of the tribe, and Llewelyn-Davies was eventually seen as something of a heroine; the films are available on YouTube because the Maasai have uploaded them, in the same way a resident at the Broadwater estate uploaded Scenes from the Farm…
… Disappearing World won a Bafta for best documentary series. The director she was paired with was a man called Chris Curling who had recently returned from shooting a film on apartheid in South Africa. They married several years later.
… Melissa Llewelyn-Davies was born into a lineage of radical women: her great-great-aunt was Emily Davies, a suffragette and founder of Girton College in Cambridge. A great-aunt was the first-wave feminist Margaret Llewelyn Davies and a grandmother was an Irish republican activist and spy called Moya who had an affair with Michael Collins, director of intelligence for the IRA during the war of independence.
Her mother, Patricia (née Parry), a Labour peeress, was the first woman to take charge of a whip’s office in either of the houses in 1973 and she was the government chief whip in the 1974-79 Labour government under Harold Wilson. Melissa was much closer to her father, Richard, also a Labour peer — they were one of the few couples who both held titles in their own right. He was professor of architecture at University College London (UCL) and designed the master plan for Milton Keynes.
When Melissa was born in 1945, the eldest daughter of three, the family lived in a house on the estate of her father’s friend Lord Rothschild and she grew up surrounded by grandeur, though she was a wild child… Her relationship with the Labour Party was long and tortured; she joined and quit several times, including after the invasion of Iraq…
… More prosaically, Llewelyn-Davies liked a glass of cold white wine, a Jane Austen novel and the odd trashy film, though in her own work she was intellectually ambitious and bent on originality — the worst insult anyone could have used against her was that her work was “low brow” in any way. Still, she did not take life too seriously and had a mischievous sense of humour. She is survived by two children from her marriage, which ended in divorce: Rosa is a lawyer and co-founder of the tech justice nonprofit Foxglove; Richard works for the London Review of Books.
Melissa Llewelyn-Davies, anthropologist and film-maker, was born on June 1, 1945. She died of pancreatic cancer on March 24, 2025, aged 79