Marita Georgina Phillips, a British songwriter and author, was born the third daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Pedro Joseph Phillips and his wife, Georgina Wernher, who was the elder daughter and co-heiress of Sir Harold Wernher, 3rd Bt, by his wife Countess Anastasia de Torby.
Education
Marita Phillips studied acting at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama and ballet at the Nesta Brooking School before training as a mime with Adam Darius, with whom she founded and ran The Mime Centre, London.
Career
Her lyrics have been recorded by artists such as Peter Skellern, Demis Roussos, William Lovelady and Art Garfunkel. She has written the libretto for the opera "Poet and Tsar", based on the lives of her great-great-great-grandfathers, Alexander Pushkin and Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. She has written the book and lyrics for the children"s musicals.
"The Dream Dealer" and "Buzz – the story of Glorybee".
She has also written the novel "The Dream Dealer". They also descend from Russia"s most renowned author and nobleman Alexander Pushkin, as well as from his African great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, the youth believed to have belonged to a family of tribal chieftains who became a protégé of Peter the Great.
Lady Zia"s sister Countess Nadezhda de Torby (or "Nada") was the wife of Prince George of Battenberg (later George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven), elder maternal uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh. The posthumous younger son Galen Crawley is a godson of The Prince of Wales.
She is currently 1536th in line for the British throne.
