Erika Christine Elizabeth Cheetham

Background

Erika McMahon-Turner Cheetham was born in London on July 7, 1939, a daughter of wealthy parents, Eric A. Turner, Under Secretary to the Admiralty, and Helen Lilian McMahon Turner.

Education

Erika attended a convent school but was expelled for writing an essay contending that God did not exist. She had an interest even then in the paranormal and the prophetic. Later, on gaining acceptance to St. Anne's College, Oxford, she cut a stylish, aristocratic figure, someone who went riding with the Aga Khan.

Career

Erika's good fortune came about because of a mistake at the Taylorian Library at Oxford, where she was working toward a doctorate in medieval languages. The librarian gave her the wrong book, the ''Propheties de M. Nostradamus.'' She found it fascinating and saw in it what she interpreted to be a prediction of World War II.

After receiving her Ph.D. Erika became a staff writer for The London Daily Mail. She wrote an article on Nostradamus in 1961 and two years later began translating his work in earnest. Her first book appeared in 1965 and became an immediate hit, as did the other two. Her publishers at Corgi Books were now excited about Nostradamus as well. ''A very profitable business to be in,'' one was quoted as saying. ''Every publisher should have a Nostradamus title on their lists. And the beauty of it is that if you get one of Nostradamus's predictions wrong, you can always remove it from the next edition.''

Indeed, at the start of the 1990's at least 10 Nostradamus titles were in print, and with the advent of the Persian Gulf war, bookstores in Britain and the United States were selling out, with total sales tripling in some cases. Ms. Cheetham, however, was ambivalent about the perspicacity of her hero. Claiming to be a linguist, a scholar and a skeptic, she once said: ''It's all rubbish, you know. Some of it is so vague and tortured and you could bend all sorts of events to fit.''

At other times she projected conviction: ''It's a question of all the portents coming together,'' she said in 1985, ''a pope with two attempts on his life, two brothers assassinated in the U.S.A. and the advent of Halley's comet.'' In her periods of skepticism, she was not alone. ''In a respectable London bookshop last week,'' wrote Francis Wheen in The Guardian in 1996, ''I was astonished to find an entire section given over to works by or about Nostradamus, the mumbo-jumbo merchant.'' The likely explanation, he said, was superstition linked to the approach of the year 2000.

Other nonbelievers in the more distant past included the Catholic Church, which in 1781 put ''Centuries'' on its index of condemned books. Ms. Cheetham also wrote the screenplay of the 1982 film ''The Man Who Saw Tomorrow'', in which Orson Welles played Nostradamus, and she was a contributor to periodicals and encyclopedias. Erika Cheetham died on May 3, 1998 in London. She was 58.

Achievements

• Cheetham earned recognition for her studies of sixteenth-century astrologer and physician Michel de Notredame (also known as Nostradamus and Michel de Nostradame), who is said to have predicted the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, the execution of King Charles I of England, and the advent of the AIDS virus, among other things. Her books, ''The Prophecies of Nostradamus,'', ''The Further Prophecies of Nostradamus'', and ''The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus'', in which she claimed to have found predictions of the execution of Charles I, the Great Fire of London, the Apollo 13 catastrophe and the spread of AIDS, sold in the millions. They were on mass-market paperback best-seller lists for years in the United States, Britain and other countries, and, since the first book appeared in 1973, they have never been out of print.

Works

More photos

• book

  • After Nostradamus 1974
  • The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus 1989
  • The Further Prophecies of Nostradamus: Into the Millennium 1985
  • The Prophecies of Nostradamus: Man Who Saw Tomorrow 1989
  • The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus by Erika Cheetham (1989-07-24) 1989

Connections

Erika was married to James Nicholas Milne Cheetham. She was divorced in 1980, and is survived by a son, Alexander M. Cheetham.

Father:

Eric A. Turner

Mother:

Helen Lilian McMahon Turner

Spouse:

James Nicholas Milne Cheetham

Son:

Alexander M. Cheetham