Until a Syrian government attack killed her six years ago, in the desperate, besieged town of Homs, Marie Colvin was the doyenne of Britain’s war reporters, although she would probably have hated the phrase.

She wrote for the Sunday Times, but she didn’t need its seal of authority on her work; her reputation outshone the paper that published her. Colvin was brave, bold, any edge of recklessness blunted by the fact that her work really had achieved what most journalists dream of when they start their career – saving lives by bearing witness.

An eye patch, worn since she lost her sight in one eye to a Sri Lankan rocket-propelled grenade in 2001, became her introduction and trademark. She was also known for her quick wit and sharp tongue. When I first moved to Kabul, grappling with the professional and emotional challenge of pivoting from years reporting about China’s rise to covering Afghanistan’s long and tragic war, I both hoped and feared that I would meet her at the Kabul bar where she drank during trips to the country.

I suspected she would find me both dull and timid (I barely skirted the margins of wars she covered in their bloodiest intensity), but I never got a chance to find out. Like many others, I overestimated how long her luck would hold.

The attack in Homs aimed to silence her and deter other journalists from following in her footsteps, but this autumn, as the brutal civil war staggers towards its 8th year, she has reappeared across screens, in newspapers and on bookshelves.

Hollywood biopic A Private War, a serious biography – In Extremis – and a powerful documentary – Under the Wire – have all come out within weeks of each other. Just months earlier, a thinly fictionalised French film was released that also explored her life and work.

For a 56-year-old who was hugely respected for her work, but hardly a household name, this reworking of her life is an extraordinary tribute to her legacy.

It is perhaps not surprising that the men who ordered her slaughter thought that the loss of another reporter would be treated as no more than a passing tragedy in her homeland America or her adopted home of Britain.

Rosamund Pike as Colvin and Jamie Dornan as Paul Conroy in A Private War. Photograph: Allstar/Aviron Pictures

But although journalism generally is not well respected, with reporters languishing alongside lawyers and politicians at the bottom of “least trusted professions” lists, there is an enduring fascination with journalists who go to war or sites of disaster – not under orders to fight or provide aid, but as observers.

They have proved fodder for art for decades, from the satire of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop to the tragedy of Cambodian genocide chronicle The Killing Fields to the hit play Chimerica, which had at its heart a journalist covering the Tiananmen Square massacre (although until recently, the protagonists have all been men).

Some of this enduring fascination may be respect for and curiosity about courage. Colvin wore her own fears extremely lightly. “Bravery is not being afraid to be afraid,” she once said. But there was no question that she would go where others would not, cross borders, stay on in war zones even as others with impressive track records of their own left.

In 1999, when she and two other women chose to stay on in a besieged compound of refugees in East Timor – as diplomats and most other reporters left, afraid of the mob – she could literally claim to have kept men, women and children alive (although she was not given to boasting and left it to others to chronicle her achievements: “Her courage saved 1,500,” read one front-page headline).

Westerners have perhaps never been further from the realities of war. With the last generation of second world war survivors and veterans heading into their final decades, and the military now a small professional corps, many Britons do not personally know anyone who has endured the dreary but terrifying daily grind of conflict. Seen through screens, violence is both compelling and insubstantial.

For those who get one step closer, it spawns grinning selfies in redundant flak jackets on the margins of conflict, boasts of helicopter rides and stories of relative – but still safe – proximity to death.

When violence cannot be escaped or forgotten, it seeps into life in a much more dangerous and destructive way. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its terrible damage is talked about today much more openly than when Colvin began her career and waged her own battle with the illness.

Being treated in hospital in Sri Lanka in 2001, where she lost an eye after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Photograph: HO/EPA

Like most stereotypes recycled in good and bad art, this cliche of the damaged hero or, occasionally, heroine provides a convenient dramatic engine for films and television, with traumas often picked over in extreme detail in films about war in particular. Few people who see war first-hand are not altered in some way by the experience, even if they escape an official diagnosis of trauma.

Colvin’s life story had an innate drama with obvious appeal in that tradition. Her attraction to extremes of danger and delight, of violence and emotion is reflected in the title of Lindsey Hilsum’s recently published biography, In Extremis.

Exceptional in almost everything she did, she saw more violence and brutality than most soldiers, her reporting had huge impact, and she moved in circles most people only read about in the pages of magazines.

Her friends stretched from the Kennedys to the editor of British Vogue, via literary, media and cultural celebrities. One early boyfriend was Lucien Carr, the man who Jack Kerouac would describe as the “glue” of the beat generation.

Colvin came of age professionally at a time when there was both more confidence in the power of journalism to transform than there is today and a flowering of a more personal, immediate style. She epitomised both.

Yet she paid a huge personal price for her work, grappling with alcoholism and PTSD, and her personal life was as volcanic as her professional life was successful.

An exploration of Colvin’s life is an exploration of critical questions about humanity and war, the impact of violence, the power and limits of empathy. It means thinking about the role and responsibilities of the media at a time when this is being fiercely disputed.

With Libyan rebels in Misrata in 2011. Photograph: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters

And there is the fact that she is a woman. There is an enduring cultural fascination with women who go to war as soldiers, reporters or medics, curiosity about what draws them to such an overwhelmingly male world and how they manage there.

Any woman who has been needled by leading questions after just one trip to a slightly unstable area is aware of this. Colvin knew it intimately and played on it. When her editors asked what had happened to the male reporters as she hunkered down with the refugees in East Timor, she virtually shrugged down the phone. “They just don’t make men like they used to,” she replied.

Although often absent from films and books about war, women have been reporting on the front lines for decades. Clare Hollingworth, who worked for the Daily Telegraph and died at the age of 105 last year, got one of the biggest scoops of the last century, breaking the news that the second world war was about to start by driving blithely into Germany in a borrowed diplomatic car and observing tanks preparing to attack Poland.

Like many female reporters who came after her, Colvin used misogyny to do some of her best work. Where women are seen as powerless, inconsequential, men are often incapable of treating female journalists as real adversaries and give them a relatively free pass.

Publicly, Colvin had little time for feminism, quoting famed reporter Martha Gellhorn’s line that “feminists nark me” in one article. Yet in private she was acutely aware of the constant demand that she outshine men to get the same opportunities. She thought a lot about differences between her coverage and that of men who dominated – and still do, although the number of women is increasingly – the trade.

One reason her reporting was so powerful is that it eschewed many of the traits tied to the trade’s macho image. She had no interest in military hardware, in picking out guns or helicopters or artillery.

She focused instead on what happens when metal hits flesh, the fate of women and children besieged, starved or fleeing. Rather than gathering stories too often dismissed as “soft” from survivors in refugee camps, she took extreme risks to document the horrors at the heart of conflict. “Maybe we feel the need to test ourselves more, to see how much we can take and survive,” she wrote of female journalists.

Her best work illuminated the cost of war through the pain of individuals: a teenager shot dead as she tried to race down a sniper alley for food, the details of her tiny gold earrings, her fist clenched, in the agonies of death, around a handful of earth.

With the photographer Paul Conroy, whose book Under the Wire forms the basis for a new documentary. Photograph: Paul Conroy/The Sunday Times/Dogwoof

The various projects coming out this autumn were driven by people who knew and loved Colvin and wanted to preserve her legacy. Hilsum was a longstanding friend, although she wrote the honest biography Colvin probably would have wanted, not a hagiography.

Photographer Paul Conroy was with her when she died, badly injured in the same attack, and swore to tell the story that she died trying to report. The documentary Under the Wire is based on Conroy’s book about that final reporting trip. He was also a consultant on A Private War.

In Conroy, a Liverpudlian ex-soldier, she found someone as courageous, committed and funny as her. Their backgrounds and social circles were wildly different, but they became a tight unit at work. The stress of war can tear people apart, but the intensity of facing death and the worst of humanity together can seal powerful relationships.

As an admirer of Colvin’s work, and a woman in a trade that could do with more of us, I am thrilled to see her story celebrated, her sacrifices remembered and the story she died trying to tell returned to screens and pages of our newspapers.

But I am also a little wary of how, particularly in the film and much of the media coverage, the courageous reporter shades so fast into tragic heroine, with the woman behind both stereotypes sometimes lost along the way. There is no question Colvin struggled with the physical and mental scars of witnessing so much conflict, had an often painful and messy personal life, while her early death was a tragedy.

But her life was not a bleak unfurling of misery. Colvin was charismatic, beautiful and funny, she found purpose and meaning in her work and took huge pride in her success and reputation.

One line from the biopic in particular struck me as a certain kind of betrayal of the life Colvin chose. “Maybe I would have liked a more normal life. Maybe I just don’t know how,” Rosamund Pike, who plays Colvin, says.

By the accounts of all her friends, Colvin was living exactly the life she had chosen for herself. She fled the stultifying normality of her small-town upbringing, driven by huge ambition and carried by her talent into a world of power, glamour and fame. She embraced being the boldest person at a frontline, the most charismatic at a party.

Covering the Arab spring in Tahrir square, Cairo, Egypt, 2011. Photograph: EPA

Also emphasised in the movie and media coverage is her childlessness. Colvin tried to conceive with both her husbands and certainly wanted a child enough to try IVF. But in life she was far more sanguine than her celluloid counterpart. “She always loved kids, but was very philosophical about the fact that she had led a life that made it very difficult to have them herself,” Hilsum quotes a close friend saying. “She didn’t say she wished she had led her life differently.”

The clearest and most rounded picture in the sweep of new releases emerges from Hilsum’s book. Colvin herself, courageous and often tortured, rises again from its pages. She kept a journal for most of her life and that gave Hilsum extraordinary access to the vulnerable woman behind the glamorous exterior.

It also catalogues the bravery, sometimes shading into recklessness, which meant she was always one step ahead of everyone else. Her icy calm in situations that would pin most people to the floor in terror, her willingness to take risks, may ultimately have doomed her. But it meant that she reached places that no one else did.

It is not all heroism. Both the book and A Private War are surprisingly blunt about the callous calculations of the industry that sends civilians to cover war. They damn the Sunday Times in particular for turning a private compulsion to go further into a modus operandi.

“You’re their prize pig,” says a friend on screen. Hilsum is less direct and acknowledges that Colvin was to some degree complicit. She tells us that Colvin wrote about the loss of her eye for the paper before it had even been operated on.

Colvin’s bosses knew, Hilsum writes, that “Marie’s risk-taking was getting them the best stories”. Courage made her vulnerable “not just because such reporting put her in danger, but because she and her editors let it define her”.

The reason she took those risks and the horrors she tried to expose and combat in her life’s work are brought to life in the documentary Under the Wire in all their gritty, painful clarity, with a force that even the best prose struggles to match.

The film seems unrelenting because it covers a short period of horror, but there are glimpses of Marie’s sharp wit, her joy and charm. And it captures the horrors she tried to share with the world and the times when she made a difference.

In western films about war, its victims are too often treated as little more than props or backdrop

A Private War is perhaps the easiest to pick apart, because of constraints of time and genre. Rosamund Pike slips into Colvin’s skin entirely, in a portrayal praised by friends and former colleagues. However, it deals largely with the violence she covered and the trauma it left behind, and captures little of her sense of fun or ordinary life.

Yet for me that was redeemed by a focus on the people to whom she devoted her working life, the civilians caught up in and crushed by war. In western films about war, its victims are too often treated as little more than props or backdrop in a heroine’s personal journey.

Matthew Heineman, the director of A Private War, is a documentary-maker and ensured that all the survivors in the film – widows shelled in a basement in Syria, Libyans roiled by the sudden explosion of war – had lived through the events that they recreated in the film.

They are given screen time, and tell their own stories, directly to viewers who would perhaps not hear them outside a Hollywood film.

I went to see it with another veteran journalist, who knew Colvin and had worked in several of the places she reported from. He went in braced for cliches, but emerged shaking.While Colvin might have been bemused to see herself celebrated on such an incredible scale, she would almost certainly have been glad to see the terrible suffering in Syria brought to wider attention again. She was killed there because she cared and wanted others to as well.

“Part of me thinks Marie is looking down saying, ‘Hey, what’s all the fuss, this is what we do,’” said Hilsum. “But I also think she would be glad that people were talking about Homs again, and hope that maybe some of the attention would be focused on Yemen and other under-reported conflicts and the people suffering in them.”

In Extremis is published by Vintage (£20). To order a copy for £14.49 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. A Private War is released in February; Under the Wire is available on demand