As a high-flying international lawyer married to one of China’s most promising politicians and with a son at Harvard, Gu Kailai appeared to have it all.

But a life of luxury and influence is a distant memory for the wife of disgraced leader Bo Xilai after a court yesterday handed her a suspended death sentence for murdering a British man – a crime she had already confessed to.

Pictured on state television, Ms Gu told the court she accepted the sentence.

The daughter of a renowned general, Ms Gu, like her husband Bo Xilai, is a member of an elite group in Communist Party-ruled China whose family background has given them influence and privilege not enjoyed by most.

But since her detention earlier this year, a new picture has emerged of an at-times volatile woman with a troubled childhood and a reported history of depression.

Like Mr Bo, she studied at the prestigious Peking University, although the pair did not meet until 1984, when she was on a research trip near the eastern city of Dalian, where he had taken a post as a local party secretary.

“He was very much like my father, that sort of extremely idealistic person,” Ms Gu, now 53, told the Southern Weekend, a local weekly, in an interview published in 2009, recalling her first encounter with Mr Bo.

“He lived in a small dirty room. He offered me an apple before telling me about his ideas.”

They married two years later and in 1987 had a son, Bo Guagua, who attended one of Britain’s most prestigious private schools, Harrow, followed by Oxford University and a postgraduate degree at Harvard.

Ms Gu began work as a lawyer the same year her son was born.

She later set up her own firm and won plaudits as the first Chinese attorney to successfully challenge a legal decision in US courts.

She recounted this experience in two books that became bestsellers in her home country.

Ed Byrne, an American lawyer who worked with Ms Gu, recalled her as a “smart, charismatic, attractive” woman.