Georgina Howell: Journalist who interviewed the famous and whose book on Gertrude Bell was made into a film by Werner Herzog

Georgina Howell, the interviewer and writer, flourished during the golden age of journalism, when subjects would allow a journalist into their lives over a period of days, even weeks, rather than giving half an hour in a hotel room under the supervision of a PR. Robert Redford flew her to his range of mountains, Pierce Brosnan drove her around in his new Porsche for three days, Bono pulled her on to the stage in front of 70,000 screaming fans.

Her pieces, for the Sunday Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair and many others, were, therefore, master classes in “fly-on the-wall” observation, and the cold eye of the journalist combined with her flair for words, resulted in some marvellous portraits of some of the biggest names in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. She interviewed, among others, Bianca Jagger, U2, Princess Diana, Princess Anne, Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Oldfield, Giorgio Armani, Karl Lagerfeld, Guns and Roses, Valentino, James Galway, Frederick Ashton, Sylvie Guillem and Alec Guinness. She endeared herself to Elizabeth Taylor by arriving with a kilo of sausages from England rather than the usual bunch of flowers.

Her father was a fighter pilot in the war. She and her mother followed his postings, involving Georgina going to many schools; in Malaya, alongside 2,000 Chinese pupils, she absorbed a work ethic and professionalism that permeated her life until she retired.

At 14, after her father had died as a result of injuries when his plane crashed, she attended my great aunt's school, Miss Ironside's, a “dame” school in South Kensington, and then went to the London College of Secretaries, where she took a journalism course. She never forgot the advice of John Betjeman, who came to lecture the girls; he begged them never to become secretaries.

Her mother, Gwen, who had scraped by writing stories and reading them on Woman's Hour, was a competition whizz – she had won a bottle of Lentheric's Lotus d'Or from Vogue for identifying the silhouettes of 20 scent bottles – and she encouraged Georgina to apply for the Vogue Young Talent contest. She won this when she was only 18 years old.

Her first task was to water the plants and make coffee for the gardening correspondent but she soon was spotted by the legendary editor, Bea Miller, who installed her in the copy department, where her first caption was “Vogue Patterns: Cottoning on to Summer”. Later she was to devise the maxim, still used, “Buy nothing until you buy Vogue”.

Later she became the Observer's Fashion Editor and next worked for a year at the Mail on Sunday as Women's Editor. A spell as deputy to Tina Brown on Tatler followed before she returned to British Vogue as Features Editor. She freelanced for many magazines including Vanity Fair, while Anna Wintour gave her six years of assignments for US Vogue while she was also under contract to the Sunday Times Magazine. She worked mainly with photographers like David Bailey, Norman Parkinson – and, of course, Lord Snowdon.

Her professionalism and doggedness were combined with a natural dignified charm and impeccable manners, and she was blessed with a rare beauty – on occasions when working at Vogue, she would stand in for Jean Shrimpton on David Bailey shoots when the photographer had rowed with his model. All this meant that she was much respected by both her editors and the subjects of her interviews. Many of them, she often recalled with a steely smile, would come on to her after the session was over.

Although she started off as a fashion journalist, she was more interested in the history and social implications of style rather than the designs or designers themselves. Her book In Vogue: Six Decades Of Fashion was more an academic study of how style responded to social attitudes, economics, wars and technology than purely a history of fashion in clothes. It was when researching this that she started up the Vogue library, which at that point consisted of piles of old magazines and negatives by the most famous photographers in the world, chucked into a cellar.

She wrote Diana: Her Life in Fashion; The Sultans of Style, a collection of her interviews; and, most recently, with her husband, Queen of the Desert, a biography of her heroine, the explorer Gertrude Bell, which was read last year on Radio Four and made into a film by Werner Herzog starring Nicole Kidman.

Until the end of her life, though she came to be thoroughly bored by designer clothes, Howell was always impeccably dressed, managing to look stunning in a wardrobe bought entirely from Hennes. With her husband Christopher Bailey, whom she had met while researching a piece on the reputed misbehaviour of the students at the Royal Agricultural College – he was the Registrar – they bought a 1,000-year-old manor house in Brittany. There she indulged her real love of gardening and looking after chickens and stray cats. Spotting a cold and emaciated horse alone in a field, she spent years feeding it carrots and apples until she finally persuaded the owner to sell it to her. She set it up in a luxurious equestrian centre, where it still lives on.

Georgina Howell, journalist: born Kimberley, South Africa 8 May 1942; married 1963 Michael Buhler (divorced 1978; one son), 1990 Christopher Bailey; died Brittany 21 January 2016.