Ira von Fürstenberg, socialite princess of the jet set age, dies

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 in Feb. 23 in Rome, her birthplace, but no cause of death was made public.

In an interview last year with the Financial Times, Ms. 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 was on cinema marquees in films such as the spy spoof “Matchless” (1967) and the spaghetti Western “Deaf Smith & Johnny Ears” (1973) alongside Anthony Quinn. She was on the pages of Vogue, was photographed by fashion giant Helmut Newton and walked the runway in a Mondrian dress for Yves Saint Laurent.

She helped launch the career of designer Karl Lagerfeld. She danced with Frank Sinatra. She organized 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,” Ms. 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 auto fortune. (The von Fürstenberg name would gain further recognition from fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, who married Ms. von Fürstenberg’s brother, Egon.)