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.