German model and author who survived Nazi Berlin and later joined the first wave of beatniks in Ibiza, dies aged 90.
Although Ingeborg Pertwee was the photogenic German wife of Jon Pertwee — the former Doctor in Doctor Who and one of Britain’s most colourful actors — she was singularly unimpressed by celebrity.
At the height of his fame, the American singer Andy Williams flirted with her at a New York party and invited her to come home with him: “Yes,” she replied innocently, “but first let me go and get my husband.”
She met the Beatles several times but they sought out her company, not the other way around, because she was so aloof. After Rex Harrison picked on a dinner party guest in an unpleasant fashion, she told him: “Shut up and eat your soup.”
On another occasion she was standing backstage while her husband was acting in a charity performance of the Who’s rock musical Tommy when Keith Moon asked if she had any drugs on her: she gave him her indigestion tablets.
Family lore has it that she snubbed Peter O’Toole soon after he had made Lawrence of Arabia, and brushed off Dusty Springfield after the singer made a pass at her.
Perhaps, given her upbringing, fame and celebrity seemed trivial and ephemeral commodities to her.
Ingeborg Renate Rhoesa was born in Berlin as the Nazis girded for war in 1935. Her father, Carl, was a mathematician and no fan of Hitler. She and her family remained in the German capital throughout the war — even when the Allies began carpet bombing the city in 1943. They spent night after night in the basement of their apartment block. At daybreak she and her younger sister would collect the still-warm shrapnel to fend off the winter cold.
The family finally fled when the Soviet Red Army reached Berlin in April 1945. They took a train westwards and spent a few months as nomads. They were put up by an aunt near Frankfurt and lived in an empty schoolhouse for a while. They finally came to rest in Bad Godesberg near Bonn, the future capital of West Germany, where the first black American soldier Ingeborg had ever met gave her the first orange she had ever seen.
Doubtless helped by her looks, she landed a job as a secretary at the Egyptian embassy in Bonn. Her boss sent her to sit outside the US embassy and note everyone who entered — essentially using her as a spy. She later became the embassy’s French interpreter though she spoke no French.
She was rescued from that invidious position when she went skiing in the Austrian resort of Kitzbühel in the early 1950s. There she met Pertwee, who had broken his leg and was in the process of separating from his wife, the actress Jean Marsh.
He was a flamboyant and adventurous character who offered respite from the stodgy German bourgeois values of that era. They were both so smitten that she moved to London in 1955 to work as an au pair, with a little bit of modelling on the side.
Being German so soon after the Second World War, she suffered a lot of verbal abuse and sometimes pretended she was Swedish. Pertwee had no such prejudice despite having served on HMS Hood shortly before the warship was sunk by the Bismarck, and later in naval intelligence. The couple married in 1960 — he was 16 years older than her and nearly a foot taller.
They lived in “Swinging Chelsea” and had two children, Dariel, now a psychotherapist, and Sean, an actor. Soon after their marriage Jon Pertwee took his wife to the then-undiscovered Spanish island of Ibiza so he could go diving. They loved it, built themselves a house, bought a bar and mixed with the extraordinary collection of artists, actors, bohemians, refuseniks and Vietnam draft evaders who washed up on the island.
They consorted with the likes of Terry Thomas, Leslie Phillips and Elmyr de Hory, the convicted forger of old masters. Spain being under the control of the dictator General Francisco Franco and subject to trade sanctions at that time, they used an old lifeboat to smuggle in everything from alcohol to Dutch caps. Jon Pertwee disliked dancing, but his wife loved it and many a night she led groups to one of the island’s first nightclubs, Lola’s.
Though English was her second tongue, she also wrote a bestselling novel, Together, which was a raunchy account of a menage-a-trois led by a thinly disguised local artist. It ruffled feathers on the island.
The Pertwees sold up in 1982 after mass tourism reached Ibiza, and bought a house in Mallorca instead. By then Jon Pertwee’s acting career was blossoming with successes such as The Navy Lark, Doctor Who and Worzel Gummidge and — though it meant little to her — they moved in elevated London circles (Stephen Ward, the osteopath and artist involved in the Profumo scandal, had once tried to paint her but Pertwee stopped him).
She was fearless, plain-speaking and made sure Pertwee’s success never went to his head. As her son, Sean, put it: “Light her at your peril, and stand well back.”
She accompanied him wherever he was working, moving the family to digs in places like Birmingham and Bath when he was performing in pantomimes. She swiftly curtailed an ill-advised move to Coulsdon, in suburban Surrey, and relocated the family home to southwest London. There she published three cookery books — two on soups and one on starters. The Pertwees also travelled extensively through Africa, the Middle East and beyond at a time when travelling to such places was still a genuine adventure.
In May 1996 they were staying with friends in Connecticut. He came to bed to find her already asleep, moved her book to the side table and lay down himself — only to suffer a fatal heart attack. They had been married 36 years. Heartbroken but stoic, she survived another three decades.
She retained a strong German accent to the last, and delighted her offspring with mangled English phrases such as “freelance chicken” and “vicious roundabout”.
Ingeborg Pertwee, model and author, was born on February 12, 1935. She died on January 2, 2026, aged 90
