Amaryllis Fleming

Amaryllis Fleming, who has died aged 73, was a dedicated and influential musician, who might have had a more glamorous career had she been less self-critical. She was the half-sister of James Bond creator Ian, and press reports concentrated on her bohemian private life, tending to obscure her musical talents: she was represented as a "flame-haired temptress" who just happened to play the cello.

Amaryllis was born into the extraordinary family of Eve Fleming, a Chelsea hostess, accomplished amateur violinist and the widow of a war hero. Her relationship with her icy mother was opaque, to say the least (Eve told her at the age of four that "you are not my daughter") and she took up music as an escape. It was only when she was 23 that she discovered that her real father was the painter Augustus John.

Amaryllis started playing the piano at three. At nine she wanted to play the violin but was diverted by her mother to the cello. She made her first broadcast at 15 on the BBC's Children's Hour and at 17 won a scholarship to study full-time at the Royal College of Music with Ivor James. In 1944 she played the Elgar Concerto with the augmented Newbury String Players.

The violinist André Mangeot steered her towards French music and in 1946 she met the musician Pierre Fournier. He offered her free tuition and, in Paris, became not just her teacher but her lover. Their liaison lasted a decade. "He opened my eyes to the immense possibilities of colour, nuance and phrasing," Fleming told the author Margaret Campbell, "particularly in regard to bowing technique, which enabled me to acquire a palette of far greater variety." She also studied with Guilhermina Suggia, Gaspar Cassadó and Enrico Mainardi - the last-named advising her to play nude in front of a mirror so she could monitor her muscle movements.

In the summer of 1950 she went to Prades in the French Pyrenees to work on the Schumann Concerto with the cellist and composer Pablo Casals. However, she was already tending towards chamber music. In 1949 she had founded a piano trio with the pianist Peggy Gray and the violinist Alan Loveday and in 1953, the year after winning the Queen's Prize, she gave her first recital with Gerald Moore at the Wigmore Hall. That year she also made her Proms debut, playing the Elgar, with John Barbirolli conducting. In 1955 she and Lamar Crowson won the cello and piano duo competition in Munich - her other recital partners included Geoffrey Parsons and Peter Wallfisch.

In the late 50s Fleming consolidated both her private life and her career, living with the instrument dealer EMW Paul - who guided her towards first a Guarnerius and then a 1717 Stradivarius - and giving premieres of works by Arnold Cooke, Peter Racine Fricker and Matyas Seiber.

By the early 60s she at last felt ready for the Bach suites. Acquiring a facsimile of the Anna Magdalena Bach manuscript, she had an Amati cello especially refitted with five strings so that she could play the Sixth Suite as it was written. "She was very much ahead of her time in Bach," said her pupil Jane Salmon, of the Schubert Ensemble of London. "She was interested in making it really dance, before the period instrument movement." Fellow cellist Margaret Moncrieff described Fleming's Bach as "life-enhancing".

With Paul's death in 1965 and the rise of Jacqueline Du Pré, Fleming concentrated even more on chamber music, forming the Fleming String Trio with violist Kenneth Essex and violinist Granville Jones (replaced, after his death, by Emanuel Hurwitz).

"Amo was very professional," Essex recalled. "She was one of the boys all right - there was no messing about. She was good." In the mid-70s she struck up a duo with pianist Bernard Roberts and a trio with him and violinist Manoug Parikian - together they produced a memorable interpretation of Beethoven's Archduke.

In 1993, Fleming suffered a stroke. Unable to play concerts, she continued to teach at both the Royal College of Music and Wells Cathedral School.

Michal Kaznowski, of the Maggini Quartet, recalled that Fleming was "an extraordinary teacher, with a prodigious memory for how a student had played one or two years earlier". He added that just one lesson with her "was fundamental in changing my bowing arm". For Bernard Roberts' son Nicholas, Fleming was a teacher who had "the most amazing ear. You would get an absolute roasting but it would be done with gales of laughter. She would always keep you buoyant. She had the utmost integrity - there was a musical reason for everything she did." Sadly, Fleming was not often recorded during her career, mainly because she was such a perfectionist. There was a disc of Paganini and Haydn with Alan Loveday and the guitarist John Williams; she and Terence Weil provided the double cello foundation for Schumann's Andante and Variations with Vladimir Ashkenazy, Malcolm Frager and Barry Tuckwell. Best of all was a Schubert quintet with the Lansdowne Quartet, including Kenneth Essex.

In the early 1990s, Fleming became interested in Buddhism after a trip to Bhutan, and in 1997 met the Dalai Lama. Weeks before her death she dragged herself from a clinic near Reading - where she was recuperating from major surgery - to have another audience with him in London. "She was still the same flamboyant, extrovert person, the same engaging personality, but her focus changed," said Jane Salmon. "She had always had this tremendous seriousness - and of course she had her fighting spirit to the end."

For Margaret Moncrieff, "life with Amaryllis was never dull. She was an extraordinary all-round intelligent person."

Amaryllis Fleming, musician, born December 10, 1925; died July 27, 1999

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