Socialite princess of the jet-set age fashioned career as model and actress
b April 17, 1940 d February 18,, 2024
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 on February 18 at her home in Rome. She was 83.
In an interview last year with the Financial Times, von Fürstenberg was asked to recall the best advice she ever received. She said it was to “learn how to say no.”
“But it is a lesson,” she added, “I never mastered.”
So defined her life of staggering privilege, as well as heartbreak and tragedy, that 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 helped launch the career of designer Karl Lagerfeld. She danced with Frank Sinatra. She organised a film festival in Manila with Imelda Marcos. Salvador Dalí once asked to paint her in the nude. He was refused.
“I was not tempted at all,” von Fürstenberg recalled in 2019, “since I was a little girl who just got married and was still in the honeymoon stage”.
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 powerful Agnelli family, which included the Fiat car company fortune. (The von Fürstenberg name would gain further recognition from fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, who married von Fürstenberg’s brother, Egon.)
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” and the mastermind behind turning the sleepy Spanish fishing village of Marbella into a luxury hotspot. (He also introduced the VW Beetle to Latin American markets.)
The prince proposed to her by telegram after he claimed he saw her in a vision after surviving a private plane crash in rural Connecticut in 1954.
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 couple arrived for the 1955 wedding in Venice aboard a gondola with von Fürstenberg’s veil flowing back to the feet of the gondolier.
Life magazine ran photos. Italian newspapers breathlessly called the event the “wedding of the century”. From her Agnelli side, the newlyweds received a specially made red Cinquecento. During the couple’s travels after the wedding, the surrealist master Dalí made the request to paint von Fürstenberg in the nude.
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 Hohenlohe took their two sons and, while on the run, sometimes dressed them as girls to avoid private detectives and others seeking to return the children to von Fürstenberg and claim a reward. (They later agreed to split custody.)
Von Fürstenberg obtained a divorce in Mexico and married Pignatari, 23 years her senior, in Reno in 1961. At one point, she made an appearance in Milan that “dispelled the strange rumour circulating through the international set that she had died,” the Suzy Says column by King Features Syndicate noted.
While in Las Vegas in 1964, a friend of Pignatari’s delivered a message to von Fürstenberg: “Baby wants to leave you,” journalists reported at the time. The divorce was finalised quickly.
But to see von Fürstenberg only as gossip-page fodder is to miss the full picture, said Foulkes, author of the 2019 photo-narrative biography Ira: The Life and Times of a Princess. During her heyday in the worlds of film and fashion, she was among the influencers, he often noted.
What she did, what she wore, what she said helped stir trends. The designer Valentino recognised her sway enough to put her in charge of his perfume division in the 1970s. “The awareness about her in a world that was pre-internet was quite astonishing,” Foulkes told Women’s Wear Daily.
In 1987, rumours began to spread that Ms. von Fürstenberg might marry Monaco’s Prince Rainier III, the widower of Princess Grace, the former Grace Kelly. Von Fürstenberg swatted down the speculation as false. “Just friends,” she said of her relationship with the prince.
Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galdina zu Fürstenberg was born on April 17, 1940, in Rome. Her father was a descendant of an Austro-Hungarian princely line; her mother was part of the Agnelli car and industrial dynasty.
The family spent World War II in Lausanne, Switzerland, and then settled in Venice. The young Ira spent time at English and Swiss boarding schools.
After her second divorce – still only in her mid-20s – she met the Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis on a plane. She had no acting experience, but De Laurentiis later said he saw star potential. She was cast in a starring role as a “beautiful but deadly” secret agent in Matchless.
“For the moment,” she was quoted as telling her father early in her film career, “my acting does not have the same power to make people flock to the cinema as my body”.
She said she began to sour on acting after her scene in Franco Zeffirelli’s epic on St Francis of Assisi, Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), was cut. Her last movie credit was in 1982.
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. He was reportedly struggling with health problems following a rigorous weightloss programme in Thailand.
At a 2019 London book signing for her biography, a Vogue journalist tried to prompt some stories from von Fürstenberg by mentioning a host of prominent designers, artists, directors and other celebrities from the past half century.
Von Fürstenberg indicated that there wasn’t enough time at the book event to start reminiscing. “I knew them all,” she said.