Meet Mrs Citizen Kane

SHE is known as Mrs Citizen Kane - the European grande dame of journalism who may decide whether her German company should seek to take over that great British institution The Daily Telegraph.

Friede Springer and two other heirs control 50% of the Axel Springer publishing empire that is mulling a £1bn tilt at Hollinger International, the former Lord Black-chaired company that owns the broadsheet and a swathe of other newspapers.

The fifth wife and widow of publisher Axel Springer was born in 1942, the daughter of a gardener, on the island of Fohr in the North Sea. Educated in Hamburg, she worked in the hotel business and then became a nanny.

Hired as an au pair by the Springer household, she fell in love with the magnate and married him in 1978. He groomed her to take over the empire he built on the back of a journalistic background and a small publishing firm he inherited from his father.

He published pulp fiction before founding Bild Zeitung in the Fifties and watched it grow into Europe's most successful paper. But his marriages were unhappy ones until he met Friede and decided she should take over the empire.

She took language courses, was given a crash course in business and joined the board of Springer in 1984, a year before her husband's death. Company executives Bernhard-Servatius and Ernst Cramer were her mentors. Cramer was Jewish and it is thought he influenced her to carry on the work of her husband in promoting the cause of the State of Israel.

Although not Jewish, Axel Springer was deeply moved and disturbed by what his countrymen did during the Nazi years. Consequently, all journalists on Bild, the group's flagship newspaper,have to sign a pledge supporting the cause of the State of Israel.

Friede Springer has won several awards for her contributions to society, including the Leo Baeck Prize from Germany's Jewish community for her efforts to rebuild German-Jewish relations and her continuing support of Israel. The couple had no children and Axel was shattered by the suicide of his son from an earlier marriage, Sven Simon, in 1980. Another son, Raimund, was considered too young to take on the company as was his third and last child from previous marriages.

Friede Springer is known as tough, level-headed, sometimes aloof but always willing to listen to company bigwigs.

With a personal fortune of more than $1bn (£560m), she was apparently charmed by the courtesy of chief executive Mathias Doepfner and has given her whole-hearted backing to the global quest for acquisitions that might yet put the Daily Telegraph in German hands.