Interview: OPERATION MINCEMEAT's Claire-Marie Hall

Today, Tuesday, August 26th, is National Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the certification of the 19th Amendment granting women a constitutional right to suffrage. Even after female suffrage was granted in the United States in 1920, women still struggled to defy social norms and break out of traditional gender roles. However, one major example of women getting to make their mark as part of the global fight for freedom occurred during the Second World War. The hit Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat tells the story of some of the women who helped make the allied success possible. 

In April 1943, the Axis Powers nearly controlled the entirety of mainland Europe. However, the Allies held territory in North Africa. Hitler and many of his troops were stationed in Sicily to prevent a potential allied invasion. Operation Mincemeat tells the story of how a few bright minds were able to deceive Hitler into believing that the allies were invading Sardinia and thus convinced Hitler to move a significant number of troops to the Italian island. Their plan revolved around leaving on the Spanish Coast a corpse—who they dubbed Major William “Bill” Martin—who carried with him documents with the details of a supposed allied attack on Sardinia. 

One of the people responsible for the grand deception was Jean Leslie, a clerk in the British war rooms. According to Ben Macintyre in his book “Operation Mincemeat,” the real Jean Leslie was born in 1923 and went to work as a secretary for MI5 as a teenager. In order to convince the Nazis that the corpse was an authentic soldier, the body had many documents on his person, one of which was a photo of Jean Leslie posing as his fiancé. 

In the musical, Jean Leslie first appears passionate and unable to keep quiet. She is persistent in helping British officials strategize while fighting for female rights within the war cabinet. Her persistence makes her a core member of the Operation Mincemeat team. She decides some of the key details of the operation and continues to fight for gender equality beyond the bounds of the operation.

Broadway World spoke with actress Claire-Marie Hall about her experience playing Jean Leslie and her take on the character.

Hall began working on Operation Mincemeat in December 2016. Since Hall joined, both the script and her portrayal of Jean Leslie have evolved. She recounts: “In terms of the character herself, she’s kind of become this different entity from when she first started. When she first started, she was this clearly outspoken woman who was striving for ambition. And over the years, she became this sort of more refined version of that, where she still has the ambition, but there’s also a lovely optimism to her and the youth kind of behind her comes along, and she learns lessons along the way of how kind of far she can push the ambition and how much she has to kind of like refine or resign herself to the time.”

In the musical, Jean’s female supervisor, Hester Leggatt, another real-life hero of the mission, plays a key role in the development of the operation while frequently reminding Jean that as a woman, she should not expect credit. “Hester teaches her there are ways to still kind of be powerful and maintain that power, but it doesn’t need to be all outspoken,” Hall explained. “As a woman of that time, I think that was a big lesson to learn, necessarily and actually, that you can be useful. You can be confronted by the fact that you are useful without getting the accolades.”

While Jean was an actual woman in the mid-1900s, her character is also a stand-in for many working women in the Second World War. “World War Two was a massive opportunity for women,” Hall stated. “Finally, they were given the opportunity to take on these working roles in society that men had left to all go fight and left vacant. So women were suddenly working in agriculture. They were suddenly working in the Army, in the Navy. They were flying planes. And I think Jean is one of these young people.” 

As part of her research for the role of Jean, Hall watched the BBC documentary “Operation Mincemeat” and noticed that World War II was when “young women at that time [finally became] relevant and kind of finally [got] their chance.”

“I think you can really see that through the character of Jean,” she explained. “‘All The Ladies’ [a number in the musical] is an absolute anthem to that. Everyone expects her to go and get married and have a baby, and finally, she’s like, ‘No, this is not what I want.’ And you can see all the other women in the secretarial pool dancing or singing along with her, going, you know this is finally what we’ve been waiting for... finally women have got their chance.”

Through playing Jean in the musical, Hall has met with descendants of Leslie (who of course loved seeing her celebrated) and grown to truly admire the real woman. “The actual person, Jean Leslie, she obviously contributed so much to this mission,” she said. “She was the actual photograph of Pam [Bill’s Fiancé] that they use in his wallet letter for Bill. And she only admitted that it was her, I think, in the 1990s when she was a lot, lot older, and when Ewen Montagu actually started talking about the mission. She didn’t want the accolades.”

Jean Leslie and Hester Leggatt were not the only women instrumental to the Allies’ ultimate success in the War. National Women’s Equality Day is a great day to celebrate all the women who helped with the war effort–even though many of them, like Leslie and Leggatt, were not from America, all these women united for a common cause. The list of international and American female heroes is long.

For example, Florence Finch, was a Filipino-American who served as a stenographer for army intelligence in Manila. According to Ms. Magazine, when Manilla was occupied by the Japanese forces, Finch hid her American nationality and was therefore able to get a job writing gas rationing vouchers. She used her instrumental role to divert fuel, damaging Japanese shipments. 

Other women served as spies during the war. One such woman, Virginia Hall, was a spy in Nazi occupied France. Among her many disguises, she pretended to be a writer for the New York Post. She planned and organised French resistance movements and disguised herself as an elderly woman while she operated, maintained, and fixed military communication systems. Even though she had a wooden leg from an injury caused by a hunting accident before the war, when the Nazis attempted to capture her in 1942, she escaped capture by traveling three days over the Pyrenees mountains through heavy snow. After the war, she became one of the first women to work at the Central Intelligence Agency.

However, female efforts were not limited to government employment. Jane Vialle who was born in the Republic of the Congo but grew up in France, was a journalist at the start of World War II. In 1940, she joined the French resistance, where she gathered intelligence on Nazi movements in France. Vialle was eventually arrested by the Vichy government in 1943 for treason and sent to a concentration camp. Despite her arrest, her communications were so expertly coded that the Nazis were unable to decipher them when they raided her house.

Even famous celebrities, such as Josephine Baker, played a key role in the war effort. Due to her popularity in the 1940s, Baker interacted with high ranking officials and informed the French military intelligence of what she learned. When the Nazis occupied France, she moved to the south, where she sheltered refugees and supplied them with Visas and other documents. After finding out Nazi military secrets, Baker would write them in invisible ink on her sheet music  and send the music to Great Britain.

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