As the searing film portrayal of legendary war correspondent Marie Colvin goes on general release, Foreign Editor David Pratt takes an early viewing and reflects on the remarkable colleague with whom he rubbed shoulders in various global hot spots.

The closing credits to the film were still rolling when the man seated behind me felt the need to voice his opinion to the woman next to him.

“She’s not an easy person to warm to,” he observed, speaking of Marie Colvin the war correspondent and figure portrayed in the film.

For a second I felt like picking him up on his remark, but then thought better of it. There’s no doubt that Marie could be stubborn and difficult, but then that’s not an uncommon characteristic among those who are not only exceptionally good at what they do but are also driven to do it.

I had gone to the Scotland press screening yesterday of 'A Private War' with a certain trepidation. The film tells the story of the life and times of Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times war correspondent who was killed in Homs in Syria in 2012 along with French photographer Remi Ochlik when the building they were in was shelled.

Paul Conroy, who was the Sunday Times photographer and a long-time reporting partner of Colvin was also seriously wounded in the same bombardment.

Last week just days before the film’s general release on the 15th of this month, a US court ruled that the attack was an act of murder carried out by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who deliberately targeted the journalists.

My apprehension about seeing the film lay largely in the fact that on more than one occasion over the years while working as a correspondent, I was to rub shoulders with Marie Colvin.

There was a near inevitably to this really, given that we were both part of that comparatively small tribe of nomadic reporters whose lives - and sometimes deaths – are played out in the world’s hotspots.

Could British actress Rosamund Pike I wondered, capture the complex and sometimes troubled character of this American journalist, whom I like many others in our profession, came to realise was almost peerless as a war reporter?

In the end I needn’t have worried, for watching Pike on screen was so eerily accurate that at times it could it could have been Marie herself. The chain smoking, the fondness for a drink, the utter sense of focus and fearlessness that could at times be discomfiting in the field as it could when she was in party mode.

Breaking sieges and being the first reporter in and last to leave was Marie’s stock in trade.

I first met her in Kosovo, where in the early 1990s she daily dodged shell and sniper fire to report on the plight of civilians there. In the years that followed our paths were to again cross in the Middle East, before in 2001 Marie herself fell victim to the violence she covered, losing her left eye after coming under government fire in Sri Lanka.

Once recovered, she chose to return to the worlds frontlines wearing a distinctive black eye patch that made her stand out even more from her colleagues.

By the time we next met in yet another place under siege, it was during the Lebanon conflict of 2006 and the patch had become her trademark. I well remember a certain enforced candlelit dinner in a little fish restaurant that miraculously had remained open in the Lebanese coastal town of Tyre, despite the bombardment by Israeli forces that had left buildings nearby still smouldering and blacked out the town’s electricity supply.

“This makes you about as blind as I am,” quipped Marie in her usual dry self-deprecating way from across the table through the flickering darkness.

Like many of the very best war correspondents the impression she gave was that nothing made her more miserable than the idea of missing out on an important story, no matter how remote, inaccessible and dangerous that conflict might be.

Over dinner or drinks in some battlefield city she would often be talking about the next assignment even though the current one had barely started.

Glamorous, tough, caring, Marie was fearless in the pursuit of what she called finding truths in a “sandstorm of propaganda when armies, tribes or terrorists clash".

But Marie’s journalism achieved so much more than that. What it also did was shine a spotlight on, and give a voice to, people who have no voice.

In this regard she has often been compared to that other great US correspondent of the Second World War, Martha Gellhorn. Like Gellhorn, Marie believed in those people she was reporting on, and was fearless in questioning the corruption of power and authority that threatened the underdog. She rarely took no for an answer, even if it meant challenging the position of her own editors and proprietors.

In her memorable biography In Extremis: the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin, friend and fellow journalist Lindsey Hilsum tells a story of how barbed Marie’s response could be when challenged.

Once when in London, she was berated by a stranger for smoking cigarettes. In her defence, Marie stung back with the reply: “Believe me, this is not how I’m going to die.”

In the field however she was invariably sanguine even when faced with the most daunting of prospects. Her grace under pressure was legendary.

Once, when she I and a handful of other journalists were returning from the Balkans on a flight from the Macedonian capital, Skopje, the plane hit a severe electrical storm during its approach into Zurich.

Glad to be out of the dangers of a war zone the reporters on board had indulged in some tension breaking drinking and felt the bad weather was the least of their worries. But as the plane was violently tossed around, my colleagues and I became increasingly alarmed.

Not so Marie, who was calmness personified and continued to crack jokes about our predicament to the utter bewilderment of a terrified cabin crew.

When back home in the UK from the world’s frontlines she liked nothing better than to sail, sometimes off the coast of Scotland, an escape from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that increasingly took its toll on her health and is so intensely and accurately reflected by Rosamund Pike’s performance in A Private War.

The last time I saw Marie alive was from a distance as she strolled along the streets of Cairo alone in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings dressed in a black trench coat and wearing that trademark black eye patch.

Haunting as the film was, I’m glad I saw it. But my fellow cinemagoer was wrong in his assessment of Marie Colvin for she was easy to warm too. War reporting and journalism as a whole is diminished by her loss.