The first attempt to construct a story around her name came in 1921, in a silent German film. In 1931, Greta Garbo appeared as Mata Hari in a fiction based very loosely on the facts. And, in succeeding decades, a range of actresses from Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jeanne Moreau, Sylvia Kristel, Marlene Dietrich and Doris Day have played her. [...]

All this fantasy was possible in part because the actual details were under lock and key. Without any substantiated research, the facts of the death of this sexual, sensual female icon by firing squad grew and mutated and became something it was not.

Ninety years after her execution for espionage, Mata Hari remains a byword for female treachery.

The director Martha Fiennes explains why she is now making a film, starring Dita Von Teese, which casts this notorious seductress in a very different light.
Mata Hari is a name everybody recognises but nobody seems to know anything about. You could argue that she is the ultimate fallen woman. What interests me about her is that she created her own identity and branding. Her story is all about fantasy – conceiving an idea and then selling herself brilliantly on it – in short, an advertiser's dream. Mata Hari is all the more fascinating when all the things that have been projected on to her since her death are considered. [...]

Mata Hari illustrates the need we have for morality tales – especially around women. Why, to take a recent example, do we care whether Princess Diana was pregnant with Dodi al-Fayed's child? What does it matter? Yet somehow it does.