The life of Irish athlete, aviator and adventurer, Lady Mary Heath, from Newcastle West, may be hitting the big screen, if the promo gets the go-ahead at the Sheffield Documentary Festival in November.

Limerick born, Lady Mary Heath was one of the best known aviators of the 1920s, a time when the entire world had gone "flying mad", thanks to the exploits of Lindbergh and Earhart.

Although her life was short, it was adventure packed, with her greatest achievement being a solo flight from Cape Town to London in 1928.

Dubbed the female Indiana Jones of her day, 'Lady Icarus' is the first full-length biography of the remarkable Limerick woman, penned by Dublin journalist, Lindie Naughton.

And plans are now afoot to put the story, on the silver screen as a full length documentary.

Lady Mary Heath , was born Sophie Catherine Pierce in Knockaderry, County Limerick, in the town of Newcastlewest, after a sensational local scandal when her father bludgeoned her mother to death.

She was one of the best known women in the world for a five year period from the mid-1920s. Before becoming a pilot Lady Mary had already made her mark.

During the First World War, she spent two years as a dispatch rider, based in England and later France, where she had her portrait painted by Sir John Lavery.

By then,she had married the first of her three husbands and as Sophie Mary Eliott-Lynn, was one of the founders of the Women's Amateur Athletic Association after her move from her native Ireland to London in 1922.

She was Britain's first women's javelin champion and set a disputed world record for the high jump.

She was also a delegate to the International Olympic Council in 1925, when she took her first flying lessons.

Lady Mary

The following year she became the first women to hold a commercial flying licence in Britain and along the way, set records for altitude in a small plane and later a Shorts seaplane, was the first woman to parachute from an aeroplane.

After her great flight from the Cape, she took a mechanic's qualification in the USA, the first woman to do so.

"Britain's Lady Lindy," as she was known in the United States,made front page news as the first pilot, male or female, to fly a small open cockpit airplane from Cape Town to London.

She had thought it would take her three weeks, as it turned out, it took her three months, from January to May 1928.

She wrote about the experience later in a book Woman and Flying, that she co-wrote with Stella Wolfe.

Unfortunately just when her fame was at its height,with her life a constant whirl of lectures, races and long distances flights, Lady Mary was badly injured in a crash just before the National Air Races in Cleveland, Ohio in 1929.

She was never the same after, though she returned to Ireland with her third husband GAR Williams,a horseman and pilot of Caribbean origin, and became involved in private aviation, briefly running her own company near Dublin in the mid-1930s.

She died destitute in 1939 after a fall from a tram car in London.