section_path: Early life/Ancestry
section_name: Ancestry
paragraph_text: Ancestry
  
  Faithfull was born at the old Queen Mary's Maternity House in Hampstead, London. Her father, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British intelligence officer and professor of Italian literature at Bedford College, London University. Her mother, Eva, was the daughter of Artur Wolfgang Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1875–1953), an Austro-Hungarian nobleman of old Polonized Catholic Ruthenian nobility. Eva was born in Budapest and moved to Vienna in 1918; she chose to style herself as Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso in adulthood. She had been a ballerina for the Max Reinhardt Company during her early years, and danced in productions of works by the German theatrical duo Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.
  
  The Sacher-Masoch family secretly opposed the Nazi regime in Vienna. Faithfull's father met Eva through his intelligence work for the British Army, which brought him into contact with her family. Faithfull's maternal grandfather had aristocratic roots in the Habsburg Dynasty, and Faithfull's maternal grandmother was Jewish.
  
  Faithfull's maternal great-great-uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose erotic novel Venus in Furs spawned the word " masochism ". In Faithfull's appearance on the British television series Who Do You Think You Are? her roots in the Austrian nobility were discussed, and the title used by family members was said to be Ritter von Sacher-Masoch.
  
  Faithfull was born at the old Queen Mary's Maternity House in Hampstead, London. Her father, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British intelligence officer and professor of Italian literature at Bedford College, London University. Her mother, Eva, was the daughter of Artur Wolfgang Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1875–1953), an Austro-Hungarian nobleman of old Polonized Catholic Ruthenian nobility. Eva was born in Budapest and moved to Vienna in 1918; she chose to style herself as Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso in adulthood. She had been a ballerina for the Max Reinhardt Company during her early years, and danced in productions of works by the German theatrical duo Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.
  
  The Sacher-Masoch family secretly opposed the Nazi regime in Vienna. Faithfull's father met Eva through his intelligence work for the British Army, which brought him into contact with her family. Faithfull's maternal grandfather had aristocratic roots in the Habsburg Dynasty, and Faithfull's maternal grandmother was Jewish.
  
  Faithfull's maternal great-great-uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose erotic novel Venus in Furs spawned the word " masochism ". In Faithfull's appearance on the British television series Who Do You Think You Are? her roots in the Austrian nobility were discussed, and the title used by family members was said to be Ritter von Sacher-Masoch.