AUDREY WOODS
Associated Press Writer


LONDON (Tue August 12, 2003) (AP) _ Lady Diana Mosley, widow of Britain's pre-war fascist party leader whose wedding guests included Adolf Hitler, has died. She was 93.

Lady Mosley, who spent much of World War II in prison, died Monday in Paris, according to a death notice printed in The Times. A spokesman at the home of her sister, the Duchess of Devonshire, confirmed that Lady Mosley had died but gave no further details.

The death notice gave no cause of death. Lady Mosley had lived in France since 1951.

In the face of criticism that lasted to the end of her life, she never ceased supporting her husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, who died in 1980, and his political views.

Nor did she express regret over her friendship with Hitler, who attended their 1936 wedding in Berlin and whom she described as ``extraordinarily fascinating and clever.'

She eventually conceded that Hitler's actions were wrong.

``We all know he was a monster, that he was very cruel and did terrible things,' she said in 1994. ``But that doesn't alter the fact that he was obviously an interesting figure. No torture on Earth would get me to say anything different.'

Diana was born the fourth of seven children of David Mitford, the 2nd Baron Redesdale, part of an extraordinary family that has made news for a half-century.

Her sisters included novelist Nancy Mitford, whose early books, ``The Pursuit of Love' and ``Love in a Cold Climate,' were based on her own eccentric childhood.

Blonde, blue-eyed Diana was an outstanding beauty _ ``the most divine adolescent I have ever beheld: a goddess, more immaculate, more perfect, more celestial than Botticelli's sea-borne Venus,' writer and childhood friend James Lees-Milne said.

At age 18, she married the immensely rich Bryan Guinness, heir of Baron Moyne, and they became part of a literary circle that included Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington and Evelyn Waugh, who dedicated his novel ``Vile Bodies' to them.

She later left Guinness and married Sir Oswald Mosley in 1936. They married secretly in Berlin at the home of Hitler's propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels. Hitler was one of the guests.

She had two sons with Bryan Guinness _ Jonathan, now Lord Moyne, and Desmond Guinness. She also had two sons with Mosley _ Alexander and Max.

No funeral plans were immediately announced.

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