The Romanian-born Vera Atkins (Stana Katic) worked for the British Special Operations Executive, known as Churchill’s Secret Army, recruiting women agents at a time when that was a novel concept.

Sarah Megan Thomas plays Virginia and also wrote the screenplay, which weaves together her character’s story with those of two other real-life heroines of the war. None of their lives was more dramatic than Virginia’s. With the MeToo movement sparking new interest in women’s rights and autonomy, these heroines speak to the present through their unrelenting battles against the sexist establishments of their day. The films are part of a trend that includes the 2016 hit Hidden Figures, about the black women who helped shape the US space program, and this year’s Ammonite, with Kate Winslet as Mary Anning, who made groundbreaking discoveries in palaeontology. Lydia Dean Pilcher, the director of A Call to Spy, is also co-director of another new fact-based drama, Radium Girls, about two sisters in New Jersey in the 1920s who sued a factory whose workers were being poisoned by radium.

All this is depicted with dramatic flair in A Call to Spy, a new film that is one of many recent dramas to reclaim underappreciated women in history. She was never caught, and escaped France by trekking 35 miles (56km) across the icy Pyrenees, in constant pain from Cuthbert. The Nazis derisively named her the ‘Limping Lady’, but so feared her that Klaus Barbie, among the most savage of Nazi leaders, ordered an urgent search for the woman he called the most dangerous of all Allied spies. She set up spy networks and safe houses, and engineered a prison escape and the explosion of Nazi supply lines.

She named her prosthetic leg Cuthbert, and went on to become the first woman field agent sent into France before and during the occupation. An American working for British intelligence during World War Two, she had lost a leg in a hunting accident years before.

Spy agent movies