Amaryllis Fleming, a leading British cellist of the generation before Jacqueline du Pre, was a pupil both of Pierre Fournier, with whom she had a whirlwind affair, and Pablo Casals.

Brought up as an adopted child, she was 24 before she discovered the truth: The woman she thought was her adopted mother was in fact her natural mother, while her father was the painter Augustus John.

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and Peter Fleming, the travel writer, were her half-brothers.

A decade before du Pre made the Elgar concerto her own, Fleming was playing it under Sir John Barbirolli's baton.

She also played Walton's concerto to acclaim. But she found the concerto circuit exhausting and unsatisfying and, latterly, preferred to play chamber music, either in the Loveday Trio with pianist Alan Loveday, alongside accompanist Gerald Moore or, later still, in the Fleming String Trio with Kenneth Essex and Emmanuel Hurwitz.

A pioneer of authentic performance of Baroque music, she also taught at the Royal College of Music.

Always anti-authoritarian, whisky-loving and with a streak of her father's bohemianism, she died in 1999, aged 73.

-Roger Moodiman, Marine Parade, Brighton