Italy before returning to the Soviet Union. He dedicated his last major work, the novel The Life of Klim Samgin, to her. H. G. Wells In 1920, Budberg met British author H. G. Wells when he made a celebrated visit to Moscow and they became lovers. She was briefly married, on 13 November 1921, to Baron Nikolai (Rotger Emil Arthur Friedrich) von Budberg-Bönningshausen (born 1896). The union was in the nature of a marriage of convenience, and they soon divorced. (It provided her with a passport, however, and thus an ability to leave Russia to visit both her children in Estonia and Gorky, who then lived near Sorrento. It is said that the Baron Budberg, a shady character, eventually disappeared in Brazil.) Moura's relationship with Wells was renewed in 1933 in London, where she had emigrated after parting with Gorky. The close relationship continued until Wells's death in 1946. He had asked her to marry him, but Budberg strongly rejected the proposal. Double agent? Budberg was widely suspected of being a double agent for both the Soviet Union and British intelligence and has been called the "Mata Hari of Russia", after the famous Dutch exotic dancer and accused spy. She is known to have visited the Soviet Union at least twice after the 1920s: first in 1936 for the funeral of Gorky (which made people call her an agent of the NKVD) and again at the end of 1950, with a daughter of Alexander Guchkov. An MI5 informant said of her, "she can drink an amazing quantity, mostly gin". Writing career Among many other activities, Budberg wrote books and was the script writer for at least two films: Three Sisters (1970), directed by Laurence Olivier and John Sichel, and The Sea Gull (1968), directed by Sidney Lumet. She translated Gorky's novel The Life of a Useless Man (1908) into English in 1971. Moura Budberg maintained residences in London at Ennismore Gardens and in Cromwell Road. She had made her permanent home in England from the time she emigrated there in 1929 until shortly before her death (31 October 1974), when she returned to Italy. Family Budberg's older half-sister, Alexandra 'Alla' Ignatievna Zakrevskaya (1887–1960), who married Baron Arthur von Engelhardt (1875-1909) in 1908 but divorced in 1909, was the great-grandmother of Nick Clegg, the leader of the British Liberal Democratic Party between December 2007 and May 2015, and Deputy Prime Minister