Eva Monley - Telegraph Eva Monley was a friend of the South African writer Sir Laurens van der Post, Prince Charles's mentor and Prince William's godfather. In 1993 she took his book about game poachers in Zimbabwe, A Far Off Place (1974), to the screen, earning the teenaged Reese Witherspoon her first major film role and herself a major producing credit. She was born Eva Mary Sachs on April 29 1923 in Berlin, where her father was a postal official, her mother a doctor. When the couple divorced, Eva lived with her mother. In 1936 the pair fled Nazi Germany, eventually settling in British-run Kenya where, after the outbreak of the Second World War, her mother was detained in an internment camp. Before she was interned, Eva Monley's mother arranged for her daughter to be adopted by a family for whom she had worked as a nurse, so sparing Eva similar confinement. It was as a young woman that Eva adopted the name Monley, having seen it inscribed on a favourite jewellery box. After the war she worked as a secretary in Nairobi; her break in the movies came when she was hired by an MGM team scouting for locations for the adventure film King Solomon's Mines (1950), who had heard of her linguistic talents. She worked as an assistant on that picture, and decided to remained in the business afterwards. After working with Preminger as his assistant on Exodus, the pair worked together on four more films, The Cardinal (1963), In Harm's Way (1965), Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) and Hurry Sundown (1967). Eva Monley also spent two years on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, which was filmed in Spain, Jordan and Morocco. Her nephew remembered that the shoot called for a classic example of Hollywood chutzpah: "They needed a blinding light effect at one point for the 'mirage" scene. So they had to paint the desert. Eva found the paint - and they painted the desert sand white. She worked in many production capacities in Asia, Europe and Africa as well as in Hollywood. Among her other credits are Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain (1967); Don Siegel's The Black Windmill (1974); Gilbert Cates's The Promise (1979); High Road to China (1983); Champions (1984); Mister Johnson (1990); and Mississippi Masala (1991). Eva Monley, who died at her home in Nanyuki, Kenya, donated her papers to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and in 1988 received a lifetime achievement award from the British Film Institute. Eva Monley, born April 29 1923, died November 12 2011