Wallis on the set of 55 Days at Peking, 1962

A picture I never quite got to the bottom of. This is a photo from 1962 taken on the Spanish set (Las Matas, near Madrid) of 55 Days at Peking, Nicholas Ray’s epic movie of the 1900 Boxer Uprising and the siege of the legations. Charlton Heston (who plays a US Marine) and the British-Chinese child actress Lynne Sue Moon (who played an orphaned girl he takes under his wing) are snapped on set chatting with a visiting Wallis (why she was there I do not know?). Heston and Moon appear to be listening with interest to the duchess, then in her midsixties. You can’t help wondering if Heston knew enough of Wallis’s past life to ask her how their re-creation of Peking matched the original she had known?