Jet-setting princess was model, actress
Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, a doe-eyed bon vivant who first dazzled paparazzi as a teen bride of a playboy prince and who became an epitome of jet-set glamour and intrigue as a model in Paris, a movie temptress and a globe-trotting socialite who mingled with royalty, rogues and celebrities, died Feb. 18 at her home in Rome. She was 83.
A funeral took place Friday in Rome, her birthplace, but no cause of death was made public.
Von Fürstenberg’s life of staggering privilege, as well as heartbreak and tragedy, played out in glossy magazines and gossip columns on both sides of the Atlantic beginning in the 1950s. As her biographer, British author Nicholas Foulkes, often remarked in various ways: You couldn’t make this stuff up.
She was on cinema marquees, on the pages of Vogue and walked the runway in a Mondrian dress for Yves Saint Laurent. She carried the princess title from a peerage with Austro-hungarian roots.
Her family also had more recent connections to wealth. Her mother came from Milan’s Agnelli family, which included the Fiat auto fortune.
As a teenager, Ira von Fürstenberg was wooed by one of Europe’s most celebrated rakes, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe-langenburg, known as the “King of Clubs.”
Von Fürstenberg’s family needed special permission from the Vatican to allow the 15-year-old girl to marry Alfonso, who was more than twice her age.
The marriage soon began to fray. In 1960, von Hohenlohe found her in Mexico City with an industrialist from São Paulo named Francesco “Baby” Pignatari, who Time magazine once described as holding “the undisputed title of Brazil’s champion playboy.”
Von Fürstenberg obtained a divorce in Mexico and married Pignatari, 23 years her senior, in Reno in 1961. She divorced Pignatari in 1964.
In 1987, rumours began to spread that Ms. von Fürstenberg might marry Monaco’s Prince Rainier III, the widower of Princess Grace. Von Fürstenberg swatted down the speculation as false.
Survivors include son Hubertus von Hohenlohe, a photographer and musician who represented Mexico as a skier in six Olympics. Her son Christoph Victorio Egon Humberto died in 2006 in a Thai prison after being charged with illegally altering his visa.