Mrs Hope: wife’s fight for justice over Observer writer’s death to be captured on film

After the DC-10 crashed while en route from Istanbul to Heathrow via Paris on 3 March 1974, it emerged that McDonnell Douglas had known about the design fault that caused the accident. Photograph: Laurent Maous/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

During a life cut short by tragedy, Francis Hope was a respected journalist, one of the best and brightest of his generation, writing for the Observer as European correspondent and a book reviewer, as well as for the New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement.

As a journalist, he risked his life covering the Vietnam war, filing reports after flying over the fighting in US military helicopters. With tragic irony, he was killed at the age of 35 while a passenger in an airliner that crashed in France, killing all 346 on board. He left behind his wife, Mary, and their one-year-old daughter Polly.

Mary Hope sued the plane’s manufacturer in a case that led to what was then the biggest payout in corporate US history and new safety measures across the industry. Now her gruelling fight to expose shocking corporate malfeasance has inspired a major British film that will be announced this week. Hope, 85, is collaborating with film-makers to tell the story of the loss of her husband and the grief that drove her to seek justice.

As the Observer’s Paris correspondent, he was on board a Turkish Airlines DC-10 that crashed in the Ermenonville Forest outside Paris on 3 March 1974 in an accident that became known as the Ermenonville air disaster. It had been en route from Istanbul to Heathrow, with a stop over at Orly airport in Paris.

The crash was caused by a rear cargo door blowing out. It emerged that the aerospace company, McDonnell Douglas, knew of its design fault. In 1972, a new American Airlines DC-10 had nearly crashed over Windsor, Ontario, when its rear cargo door blew out at 12,000ft. It emerged that the same failure had occurred in 1970 when the plane was being tested on the ground.

Mary Hope – who was employed by the BBC, where Polly now works – was persuaded by the Sunday Times to sue McDonnell Douglas for building a lethal aircraft. She embarked on what was to become a “nightmarish” fight that lasted three years. Asked what kept her going, she told the Observer last week: “I just was determined to get the truth. It was as simple as that. It certainly wasn’t the money – although, obviously, the money was very helpful.

“But that was not my impetus … I was just the person who happened to be in the right place at the right time to pick up the baton and run with it.”

Struggling to understand corporate negligence that can lead to such tragedy, she said: “I suppose if you’re part of a corporation like that, you sort of mindlessly go through with the party line… Look at the Post Office [scandal]… It’s the same thing.

“You protect the corporate entity to which you have given yourself. It’s as simple as that. Then a lot of people presumably in McDonnell Douglas had no means of knowing what the actual truth was.”

The film will show that she found herself in the line of fire, “accused by insurers Lloyd’s of London of being a money-grabber, spied on and pressured to end her action, with offers of a secret out-of-court settlement”. She stood up to them and saw other British families join her class action.

It led to 1,123 claimants receiving the equivalent today of about $311m (£247m) and the US Federal Aviation Administration enforcing new safety measures across the aircraft industry, although no individual was ever held directly responsible for the crash.

The film, titled Mrs Hope, will be announced this week, just ahead of the 50th anniversary of what remains the single greatest loss of British life in an air crash. Its British producer, Guy de Beaujeu, told the Observer that it will tell the story of “appalling corporate malfeasance” and “a litany of criminal failings” that would never have otherwise come to light: “It’s just so shocking. You actually can’t believe how people can sleep at night. This was very much a David and Goliath fight.”

He drew parallels with Erin Brockovich, the American legal clerk who took on the US utility company Pacific Gas and Electric over water contamination, inspiring the 2000 film starring Julia Roberts. “With Erin Brockovich, they agreed the payout when they realised they were toast. Unfortunately, the same thing happened here – that McDonnell Douglas suddenly saw the weight of evidence against them and finally thought they’d better settle. But they put everyone through three years of hell.”

De Beaujeu’s previous films include the acclaimed screen version of Journey’s End, RC Sherriff’s powerful play about the first world war, which starred Sam Claflin and Paul Bettany.

For his latest production, he is collaborating with one of the key journalists on the Sunday Times team, Elaine Potter, who went on to co-found the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “which seeks out stories we should all care about”. She uncovered crucial evidence, including a document from Convair, the cargo door manufacturer, warning that if the cargo door was not fixed, a DC-10 would be lost with all on board.

Francis Hope’s Observer obituary, headed “Reporter, poet, polymath”, paid tribute to his “dazzling intellectual gifts”. It noted his reputation as “the cleverest and most fastidious of reviewers and essayists”, one who was “ready to tackle almost any subject from poetry to political philosophy” and whose criticism was “certainly astringent, often very funny, and perhaps wounding at times, but it was never crudely dismissive”. The obituary also praised his ability to transform the complexities of French politics, for example, into “neat silk purses of copy, concise, punctual and written with wit and insight”.

Mary Hope had been with him for 15 years, since meeting at Oxford: “He was the cleverest, brightest man… the youngest fellow ever of All Souls. He was sparklingly funny and witty… but he didn’t strut around and say, ‘look at me’. Everybody loved him. This sounds like a grieving widow, but it is actually true.”

De Beaujeu was inspired to make the film by a friend who was seven when his father, a farmer, died in the same crash, one of 18 members and supporters of the Bury St Edmunds rugby team who were killed.

He said: “Elaine [Potter] and Mary Hope could not bring back the victims of the crash, but they were able to change the lives of thousands of families affected by a disaster that should never have happened.”