Not long after she celebrates her 80th birthday, the sophisticated and still attractive Lady Lendale Sophia Loren — widely known as "Lady L" — invites her biographer, Sir Percy Cecil Parker, to her summerhouse to recount the life she has led.
Louise, fleeing her humble Corsican origins, travels to Paris where she finds work in a brothel as a laundress. There she falls in love with Armand [Paul Newman], a thief and somewhat inept anarchist, and she soon becomes pregnant by him. But before Armand can put a bomb to use in an assassination plot against a Bavarian prince, Louise’s path crosses with the wealthy Lord Lendale [David Niven], who is so taken by the young woman that he offers to help them escape if she will agree to join with him and present Armand’s child to the world as his own. Dickie explains that several of his aristocratic relatives are mad, and he wants new blood in his family.
Lady Lendale ascends into great wealth and high society, and together with Lord Lendale she raises a large family. Many of Lady Lendale’s children and grandchildren go on to hold elite positions in government, the military, and the Church of England, though she points to a sizeable cohort of “black sheep” at her birthday party.
In the telling, she reveals the deepest secrets: she and Lord Lendale were never married because he had a deep respect for the institution of marriage. She and Armand were married more than fifty years earlier, and Armand fathered all their children while posing as the family’s chauffeur. Dickie built the summerhouse as a private meeting place where they could be together. She has even kept an unexploded bomb on a table there, not knowing how to dispose of it. A horrified Sir Percy declares her biography would be unpublishable. She agrees—The story is > "too moral."
As an aged Armand bundles them into a limousine, the ancient bomb explodes, blowing the summerhouse to smithereens. Sir Percy collapses in the backseat, and Armand (who drives with the vigor of an anarchist) heads off down the road—or portions of it.
The film hints at a darker possibility from the original source: the novel’s grim ending where Louise might have hidden Armand in a safe, and when asked what happened to him, she could open a closet to reveal his skeleton. The movie toys with that possibility, inviting first-time viewers to wonder whether Armand’s remains lie hidden in some overlooked corner, while keeping the truth guarded behind Louise’s wry humor and the fading echo of a life spent balancing secrets, love, and reputation.
Throughout its lush, ironic examination of class, memory, and moral ambiguity, the story remains anchored by the central trio—Paul Newman as Armand, Sophia Loren as Lady Lendale, and Cecil Parker as Sir Percy—whose intertwined destinies illuminate how far someone will go to protect the people they love.
