Romanian princess, humanitarian

MARINA STURDZA 1944 -2017

Marina Sturdza, who fled Romania as a three-year-old princess and returned after its repressive communist government was routed to become one of her country’s leading humanitarians, died Oct. 22 at her home in New York. She was 73.

The cause was cancer, her stepdaughter, Lynn Harvey, said.

A would- be diplomat and former journalist, Sturdza ended her self-imposed exile in Canada and the United States in the mid-1990s, several years after communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was deposed. She then became fully engaged in promoting foreign investment in Romania, and supporting child protection and palliative care programs there.

She was a patron of Hope and Homes for Children, Hospices of Hope Casa Sperantei, FARA Romania and other causes. She received the European Union’s Women of Achievement Humanitarian Award in 2005.

Her parents belonged to Romania’s reigning family, but her early years were far from a royal fairy tale.

Marina Nicole Sturdza was born on April 25, 1944, in Brasov, in the Transylvania region, to Romanian aristocrats, Ion Sturdza and the former Ioana Soutzo.

They divorced when Marina was an infant. Her mother’s second marriage, to a Romanian industrialist, Dumitru Bragadiru, also ended in divorce. Her mother later married Richard Sankey Malone, who died in 1985.

Following the communist takeover, Sturdza’s parents fled Romania in 1948 under assumed names. Marina remained briefly with her grandmother, who helped her flee separately by placing her on a train; the girl had been sedated so that she would not betray her nationality by speaking Romanian.

The family lived in Switzerland, France and Italy until they immigrated to Canada under an agricultural program. Her stepfather was put to work on a pig farm near Alberta. After about eight months, the family moved to Toronto.

In 1970, Sturdza married Denis Harvey, a j ournalist who went on to become editor- in- chief of The Toronto Star. Their marriage ended in divorce.

Sturdza became a journalist herself, covering fashion and culture as a columnist for The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star She worked briefly for designer Oscar de la Renta in New York before being hired as a marketing manager in Geneva for a United Nations Children’s Fund greeting card program.

She returned to Romania for the first time in the early 1990s.