Spanish heiress fascinated and appalled
1926-2014
THE 18th Duchess of Alba, who has died aged 88, was Spain’s richest woman and a regular fixture in gossip publications on account of her forthright character and colourful private life.
In later life, with her flamboyant manner and shock of frizzy hair, the thrice-married Cayetana FitzJames Stuart fascinated and appalled in almost equal measure.
Known for her piping, querulous voice and often outrageous clothes, she was frequently photographed at society weddings and bullfights. Her passions were flamenco, horses and painting; she became the subject of a television series and a flamenco show based on her life.
The Spanish media estimated the duchess’s wealth at between
million (about R8.1-billion) and billion; her landholdings were said to be so vast that she would have been able to cross Spain from north to south without setting foot on anyone else’s property.
According to Guinness World Records, she had more titles than any other person on the planet, being a duchess seven times over, a countess 22 times and a marquesa 24 times. Yet she always insisted she was not rich. “I have a lot of artworks, but I can’t eat them, can I?” she once said.
María del Rosario Cayetana Paloma Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Fernanda Teresa Francisca de Paula Lourdes Antonia Josefa Fausta Rita Castor Dorotea Santa Esperanza Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva Falcó y Gurtubay was born in her family’s neoclassical Palacio de Liria in Madrid on March 28 1926, the only child of Don Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó, 17th Duke of Alba, and Doña María del Rosario de Silva y Gurtubay, 9th Marquesa of San Vicente del Barco. Her godmother was Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain.
Cayetana did not have a happy childhood. Her mother died when she was eight, and three years later her father took her to London, where he had been appointed ambassador for the Spanish MUCH MARRIED, BUT ALWAYS IN LOVE: Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart, the Duchess of Alba, in Turkey in 2012 Nationalist government.
Cayetana was considered a beauty in her youth and was reputed to have had a lively love life. In 1947 she married Don Pedro Luis Martínez de Irujo y Artacoz, a naval officer and son of the Duke of Sotomayor, in a ceremony at Seville Cathedral.
Cayetana succeeded as Duchess of Alba on her father’s death in 1953, and she and her first husband had five sons and a daughter. However, the father of her fourth son, Fernando, was widely rumoured to have been the Sevillian flamenco dancer Antonio el Bailarín.
Her first husband died in 1972, and six years later the Duchess shocked Spanish society by marrying Jesús Aguirre y Ortiz de Zarate, an unfrocked Jesuit priest and freethinking intellectual 11 years her junior who had once been her confessor. It was not so much his dubious religious credentials that were considered scandalous as the fact that he was illegitimate.
After Aguirre’s death in 2001, it was generally assumed that the duchess, now in her mid-70s, would live her twilight years alone. But a few years later she was reported to be dating Alfonso Díez Carabantes, a minor civil servant in Spain’s department of social security and a man 24 years her junior.
On several occasions the duchess’s children, apparently fearful of being separated from some of their inheritance by a man portrayed by detractors as a gold-digger, were said to have blocked the couple’s plans to tie the knot.
The duchess was resentful of her children’s interference. In August 2011, however, the prospect of a damaging rift in Spain’s most prominent noble house appeared to have been averted after a deal was made under which the duchess agreed to divide up her fortune between her children in advance of her death — and her groom renounced any possible claim to her wealth. She and Díez then married.
The duchess is survived by her husband and children. Her eldest son, Carlos Fitz-James Stuart, 14th Duke of Huéscar, born in 1948, inherits the Alba titles. — © The Daily Telegraph, London MIKE Nichols, who has died aged 83, was a Broadway and Hollywood director popularly supposed to possess the Midas touch thanks to an early stream of critical and commercial hits.
He won nine Tony awards for his work in the legitimate theatre and an Oscar for his second film, The Graduate (1967), which introduced Dustin Hoffman to the screen and became a landmark of the new permissive cinema of the ’60s.
Grossing $50-million, The Graduate was a huge commercial hit, unerringly reflecting the contemporary views of young people worldwide. It was the high-water mark of Nichols’s career.
Nichols won his most recent Tony in 2012 for directing a Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman.
In the theatre he was known as an innovator in terms of dramatic “business” and as an actor’s director. His skill with actors carried over into the cinema, where he coaxed Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis into Oscar-winning performances in his first film, an adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). In the same film, Richard Burton was outstanding as the waspish academic whose deteriorating marriage forms the focus of the drama.
Other players who did some of their best work under Nichols’s direction included Meryl Streep in Silkwood (1983), Heartburn (1986) and Postcards from the Edge (1990); Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl (1988); Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Heartburn (1986); and Julia Roberts in Closer (2004) and Charlie Wilson’s War (2007). He directed John Travolta, as a Clintonlike president, in Primary Colors (1998), and in 2003 he turned the 1993 Broadway sensation Angels in America into a successful television miniseries.
Nichols himself never made great claims for his work. While acknowledging Ingmar Bergman and Jean Renoir as artists of the cinema, he placed himself in an altogether lower category. “The rest of us,” he said, “make entertainment. And that’s an absolutely honourable profession.”
He was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin on November 6 1931, the son of a Russian-Jewish doctor who had emigrated to Germany after the revolution.
In 1938 Nichols’s father emigrated to the US and set up in practice as a GP in Manhattan under the name Paul Nichols, formed out of his Russian patronymic Nicholaievitch.