Meeting her prince: the Aussie princess you’ve never heard of
She grew up barefoot on the beach in Australia. So how did this striking young woman win the heart of a prince and marry into one of Italy’s grandest families? Princess Niké reveals all to Susan Chenery.
The medieval palace sits high on a hill outside Rome. Above it the stone houses in the village of Artena seem almost sculpted into the vertical mountain. Below her walled garden, the sheer valley drops away to the fertile plain. From her windows, the view sweeps across valley and mountain, and away into infinity. There was a time when her husband’s family owned all the land they could see.
Princess Niké Arrighi Borghese lives with frescoed walls, arched vaulted ceilings, marble floors and magnificently proportioned rooms.
The heraldic symbols of the illustrious and noble Borghese family are carved across doorways, and on the weather vanes through the town.
The weight of history is everywhere in these rooms, in this place; the history of great accomplishments and dastardly
deeds. Yet Niké wears it lightly. “It’s a joy, I welcome it. It is a responsibility that you honour. I try and honour it. I do art and music wherever I go.”
Niké’s mother was Australian. She grew up here and went to Kincoppal, School of the Sacred Heart, in Rose Bay, Sydney. It gives her the perspective to shrug off what might otherwise be a burden.
“I have lovely memories of being free, sometimes barefoot, going to the beach,” she says. “I love Australia. I had this happy childhood and that is forever.”
Niké would go on to become an actress, an artist and would meet her prince. Her elder sister, Luciana Arrighi, would become an acclaimed film designer, winning an Oscar for art direction in 1993 for Howards End, one of three Oscar nominations.
“My sister and I were always doing theatrical things,” Niké says. “She started it. We’d create something and I’d be the funny actress with the balloons for bosoms. She would direct it and make it beautiful. In a way, we were acting out our lives as young kids.”
Since most of us are unlikely to meet a prince, let alone snare one, I take this opportunity to note what characteristics you might need to have. I meet Niké at a weekend party at The Crisp Galleries Australia at Yass, where there is an exhibition of her etchings and paintings. She is among old friends in beautiful gardens and strikes me as one of those who are predisposed towards happiness, those permanently positive people who never have a dark day.
A small, thin, wiry woman glistening with discreet diamonds, at 70 Niké is “a great walker”, who walks up the steep incline of Artena every night after choir practice. “It is nice to sing sacred music,” she says. The accent is clipped and English. Gold chains hang down a pink silk Chinese top. She is charming to everyone; full of light, love and joy. This would rule me out on the prince front. “I love my family, the people around me. I thank God often,” she says. “I’m very, very grateful.”
Meeting her Prince
Her mother Eleanora “Nellie” came from the Cox family, who had settled Mudgee in the early 1880s. Nellie was a cousin of the author Patrick White and became a prima ballerina. “She danced with Robert Helpmann, but she was tall,” Niké says. So Nellie became a showgirl. “She started doing musical comedies because they didn’t mind tall girls.” Nellie met Count Ernesto Arrighi when he was the Italian Consul in Melbourne. “They fell in love and when he went back to Rome she wanted to be closer to him. So she went to Paris.” Here she was discovered and became a model for haute couture fashion house Schiaparelli.
Niké was born on the French Riviera in 1947, where her father was Italian Consul during the war and he was jailed by the Germans for not releasing funds held in trust for Italian workers.
Her father, Niké says, was a violinist and artist, as well as a diplomat, and never used his title. “Even though he was a Count, he never used that because he said, ‘Italy is a republic and I am an officer of the Foreign Office’. He wasn’t interested in it.”
Australia was his first diplomatic posting after the war, but he died at
45, when Niké was a baby. Later, her mother would take them through Italy to see the country of their father. “My mother took us from the toe to the top in a tiny Fiat 500 car,” she says. “Then we bought a big demijohn of wine and there was no room for us anymore.”
When Niké was 15, her mother befriended a young Italian prince who had arrived in Australia. “My mother was a friend of his boss. He came to our house as a guest. My mother thought she would help him. She gave him books to read. She was fond of him. I remember meeting this prince who came for dinner. I thought he was beautiful, but I was 15 and he was an old man at 26. I never thought anything more about it. My mother never told me she had affection for him. She was brilliant. If she had said, ‘I like that boy for my daughter’ … well.”
Niké studied art, but left Australia to become a model for Balenciaga and Nina Ricci in Paris before she won a coveted place at the prestigious
Royal College of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. Before she had even graduated, she was offered a role in the 1968 film The Devil Rides Out, with Christopher Lee. For the next 10 years, Niké worked in film, TV and theatre, often with the great New Wave film directors Ken Russell and Jean-Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut in
his famous elegy to film-making, Day For Night. Truffaut, she says, “was a great guy. Profound and adorable.”
She loved the theatre and the engagement with the audience, but films, she says, can be boring. “You are sitting around waiting to be called. So I used to sketch the whole time to keep myself sane. Art was my passion, obviously, I just did it all the time.”
Niké was living in Rome when her mother died and she came to Australia to settle her affairs. “I looked for this young man I’d met years ago,” she says. “I wanted to see him again. I wrote a letter to his old address and the letter was sent on by his brother. He answered from Hong Kong and said, ‘Are you coming?’”
From the moment he met her at the airport, that was it. “We fell in love. I couldn’t live without him, I decided. So I went back to Rome, got my cat, said no to a film with [Federico] Fellini. It was one of the last films he did. I was in love. I was going to Hong Kong.”
A blissful life
Prince Paolo Borghese was an engineer. “He did the electrical towers going towards Canberra,” Niké says. “And around parts of Victoria as well. Then he put up towers on Hong Kong island. The last job he did in Hong Kong was the cable car in Ocean Park.”
Paolo had good reason to live outside Italy. His father, Junio Valerio Borghese, was a navy commander, she says, “one of the most famous figures in the war in Italy. He was the commander of a special branch of the submarine corp and they invented the little pigs [tiny two-person submarines] that went under and planted bombs on the English ships, I am afraid. He and his men got gold medals after the war.”
Niké is far too discreet to mention Junio ended his life in disgrace, exiled in Spain, known as The Black Prince. Following the surrender of Italy in 1943, he remained fighting for the Nazis and would be a hard-line Fascist for the rest of his life. Although Junio had been a war hero, at the end of the war he was tried and convicted of collaboration, spending four years in prison. He became a Fascist figurehead, forming the neo-fascist political party Fronte Nazionale, and political outcast, shunned for his extremism. In contrast, his son, Paolo, Niké says, was “a timid person, with a big sense of humour. He had the most beautiful blue eyes.”
Married in 1977, the years in Hong Kong were blissful. Their daughter, Flavia, was born there, but Niké was unable to find work as an actress. “Bruce Lee was famous in 1974 and I wasn’t Chinese.”
She taught handicapped children and kept painting and drawing. “I’d have loved to have kept acting, but I was so much in love, it took the place of the theatre.” In 1976, she won first prize for Graphic Art at the Hong Kong Biennial. She also learned Tai Chi, which she still practises.
When they returned to Italy in the early ’80s, Paolo decided to fix the crumbling family palazzo. It had been in the Borghese family since the early 1600s when the village was bought by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an art collector who assembled one of the biggest collections in Europe. He built the Villa Borghese in Rome to house his collection. It’s now a gallery and park.
“Paolo followed the workers around, saying it had to be done like a 16th-century building,” says Niké. “He was on the roof all the time helping them. But, unfortunately, he worked too hard and had a heart attack [in 1999 at the age of 65].”
Even though the Palazzo Borghese is divided into four apartments, one for each of Paolo’s brothers and sisters, Niké is the only person who lives there. “I am still there and still trying to keep the building up. It needs repairs, but I love the place. I have got cats and dogs, whom I love. There is a big park with lovely trees in it.”
She still teaches at the Academy of International Arts in Rome, to “usually pupils from Japan and Korea who are really interested in art. It’s a pleasure.”
She has recently painted a triptych, as part of The Face of Mercy project, which was given to the Pope. She has composed music, with a piece written in 2007 for the victims of the Boxing Day tsunami still performed in Italy.
Asked for advice for women setting out in the world, Niké looks at the trees out the window. “Go outside. See the beauty of a leaf, of a bird, an insect. You just have to look, that’s all you have to do. If they look in the mirror they mightn’t see themselves, but young people are always beautiful.”