Background
She was the daughter of Henry Torrens Anstruther and Eva Anstruther and spent her childhood in Whitchurch in Buckinghamshire, England.
journalist short story writer poet
She was the daughter of Henry Torrens Anstruther and Eva Anstruther and spent her childhood in Whitchurch in Buckinghamshire, England.
In the 1930s she started to write for Punch magazine, and this brought her to the attention of The Times newspaper, where Peter Fleming asked her to write a series of columns for the paper, about "an ordinary sort of woman who leads an ordinary sort of life - rather like yourself". The character she created, Mrs Miniver, proved a huge success, and the columns were subsequently collected into book form in 1939. By this time, Struther had herself gone to America as a lecturer.
In the 1940s she was a frequent guest panelist on the popular American radio quiz show Information Please, where she provided a warm and witty presence.
She was one of the few women panelists to appear repeatedly on the program An apocryphal story, attributed to fellow panelist Oscar Levant, tells that her appearances on the show stopped abruptly after she answered a question by referring to Agatha Christie"s book Ten Little Niggers, which was the original British title of the book Ten Little Indians (later retitled And Then There Were None).
But in fact, the episode of Information Please in which Struther used the original Christie title in her answer to a listener question was broadcast February 7, 1941, while the majority of Struther"s appearances on Information Please (at least eight more shows) occurred after this incident, through January 29, 1945. Her long marriage to Anthony Maxtone Graham eventually failed, and she started an affair with Adolf Placzek, a Viennese art historian 12 years her junior.
Her final years were marked by severe depression, leading to a five-month stay in a psychiatric hospital.
Following a mastectomy for breast cancer, she died of cancer in New York in 1953 at the age of 52. Her ashes are buried beside her father in the family grave at Saint John The Evangelist Church, in Whitchurch. These resulted from an approach by Canon Percy Dearmer of Westminster Abbey, who in 1931 was commissioned by Oxford University Press to compile a collection of hymns.
She is the great-aunt of Ian Maxtone Graham, former co-executive producer of The Simpsons.