‘Formula One drivers accepted the risks. This was the life they loved’: Italy, 1957

It was a Monday evening when I first met the English racing driver Peter Collins, and a week later we were married. It was 1957, and I was an actor. He was passing through Miami, where I was starring in a play. He came to the theatre after our mutual friend Stirling Moss said we should get in touch. We sat in the bar all night, talking. He was so charming and handsome, so full of life.

When he proposed on the Wednesday, I said yes straight away. My father worked at the UN, and he flew down to try to stop things. He spent the day with Peter and decided, actually, I couldn’t wish to meet a better man.

Life after that was a whirl. Peter was one of Formula One’s great drivers. We travelled from country to country, from grand prix to grand prix. I’d sit in the pits while he raced and, in the evenings, everyone would gather in the hotels and restaurants.

This photograph was taken at the start of the 1957 Mille Miglia, a 1,000-mile open-road endurance race around Italy. Peter is in the woollen hat talking to Alfonso de Portago, a fellow Ferrari driver from Spain. They were friends and quite similar – both of them were determined to squeeze every drop of excitement from life. Alfonso was never without a girl, and very rarely the same one.

This was the last time we ever saw Alfonso. He was leading the race when a tyre exploded and his car flew into the crowd, killing him, his navigator and nine spectators. Five of them were children. It was a catastrophe. They never held the Mille Miglia again after that.

I don’t remember how Peter reacted. Racing was dangerous: death wasn’t common, but it wasn’t unusual, either. Drivers accepted the risks, because this was the life they loved. I remember once Peter started talking about if something should happen to him, but I told him not to. I didn’t see any good coming from thinking about it.

I never worried. I knew he wasn’t indestructible, but he knew how to manage the risks. He was a great driver: when he won the British Grand Prix in July 1958, they even said he might become the best. He was 26. He died three weeks later. He lost control on a corner during the German Grand Prix. They say he was thrown from the cockpit and hit a tree. I don’t like to think about it.

I was in the pits. I knew something was wrong when he didn’t come round, but it was only when I found out he was being airlifted to hospital that I realised it was serious. When I got there myself, I was taken to a phone – my dad was on the line from the US. He’d heard what had happened and had pulled strings to find out more. He told me Peter was gone. He said he didn’t want a stranger telling me.

They took me into the basement and showed me his body. I saw his foot under the sheet and said that was enough. I can still see it now. It won’t ever leave me. We’d just bought our first house, near his parents in Kidderminster. We were just starting our life together, and there it was: over.

I moved back to the US afterwards. I had only a year and a half with Peter, but it was the most joyous time. He was a wonderful man: a brilliant driver with a brilliant spirit. I feel so lucky to have been part of his life.

Ferrari: The Race To Immortality is on DVD from 6 November. Ferrari: Under the Skin opens at the Design Museum on 15 November.

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