Taking a final bow

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BEEN AND GONE By Bob Chaundy BBC News Profiles Unit Our regular column covering the passing of significant - but lesser-reported - characters of the past month.

•Lucie Bruce, who has died aged 82, was a wartime resistance heroine. As Lucie Vanosmael, she joined the organisation as a 15-year-old in her native Belgium, spied on German troops, blew up bridges and a railway station, and helped repatriate downed British airmen. Codenamed Lulu, she was eventually captured by the Gestapo, interrogated, and tortured. All her fingernails were pulled out and she faced three mock executions. She was sent to a German labour camp and escaped despite being shot in the arm. Eventually, she reached Belgium again and continued her resistance work.

Jellicoe was highly decorated for service•Lord Jellicoe, who has died aged 88, also had a proud war record. He was decorated for his part in a sabotage attack on a Nazi airfield in Greece in which he destroyed 16 enemy aircraft. He became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1963, and became Leader of the Lords under Edward Heath seven years later. He was also on the boards of Smith's Industries, Morgan Crucible and Tate and Lyle. The only blemish on his career was when he was caught using call girls in 1973 and resigned from the government as a result.

• Kenyan scientist Job Bwayo also used prostitutes but for research purposes only. He became world famous in the field of Aids research when he discovered an apparent natural immunity among a group of 60 prostitutes in Nairobi's Majengo slums. He found that the women were uninfected by the HIV virus because they had developed T-cells, an important part of the body's immune system that killed off the virus. This discovery has led to some of the most promising Aids vaccines currently in development. Job Bwayo was shot dead in a Nairobi car-jacking incident. He was 58.

• If women were the subject of research for Job Bwayo, they were the life's work for Angela King. For almost four decades at the United Nations, this Jamaican diplomat strove to secure women's rights around the world. Most notably, she served as head of the UN Observer Mission in South Africa during the transition to democracy, she fought for the rights of women in the Balkans after the civil war there in which rape and abuse were common, and she promoted women in Afghanistan whose rights were restricted by the Taleban.

The enigmatic painting inspired Ray Evans• It was one particular woman, the Mona Lisa, which inspired the lyricist Ray Evans's greatest hit. Well, nearly. He was going to call it Prima Donna but his wife preferred Mona Lisa. Along with his partner Jay Livingston, he wrote it for an Alan Ladd movie, Captain Carey, USA in 1950. They asked Nat King Cole to sing it, but Cole wasn't sure if a song based on a Leonardo da Vinci painting would sell. Eventually, he was persuaded and it became one of his greatest hits. Ray Evans also wrote Que Sera Sera for Doris Day. He was 92.

• Football crowds all over the UK have adapted Que Sera Sera as an FA Cup anthem, and it was another adaptation of football that made Alejandro Finisterre famous - he invented table football. In November 1936, after a bomb blast during the Spanish civil war had left him lame, he set upon his idea and patented it the following year. He once played the game with Che Guevara on a trip to Central America where he'd gone to set up a poetry magazine that became an important outlet for Spanish exiles from the Franco regime. Finisterre was 87.

Among others who have died this month are musicians opera singers , singer , actors , film director , theatre director broadcaster , war criminal Maurice Papon, and model Anna Nicole Smith.

Others who have died in February include: musicians Al Viola, Eric von Schmidt, <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6404135.stm">Billy Thorpe</a> and Ian Wallace; opera singers John Thresh and Edgar Evans; singer <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6337375.stm">Frankie Laine</a>; actors <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6346301.stm">Ian Richardson</a>, Bruce Bennett, Derek Waring, Janet Blair and Ellen Hanley; film director <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6388567.stm">Fons Rademakers</a>; theatre director <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6365169.stm">Steven Pimlott</a>; theatre director <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6370765.stm">Sheridan Morley</a>; war criminal <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6372379.stm">Maurice Papon</a> and model <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6344725.stm">Anna Nicole Smith</a>.