The socialite who lived a public life of glamour and heartbreak

Ira von Fürstenberg rarely turned down an adventure. The Italian socialite, model, and actress married a prince as a teenager and became a globe-trotting bonne vivante whose passions and heartbreaks were breathlessly chronicled by gossip magazines. She starred in more than 25 films, helped launch designer Karl Lagerfeld’s career, and danced with Frank Sinatra. But when the artist Salvador Dalí asked to paint her nude after her 1955 wedding, the newly minted princess demurred—a rare occurrence. “Learn how to say no” was the best advice she ever got, she once said. “But it is a lesson I never mastered.” Princess Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galdina von Fürstenberg was born in Rome to a father who was a poor nobleman and a mother whose family owned Fiat. Her parents allowed her to marry Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe Langenburg at age 15; he was more than twice her age. She soon became “the epitome of the jet set,” said The Telegraph (U.K.), though the marriage quickly soured. Von Hohenlohe sent armed policemen to catch her cheating with Brazilian playboy Francesco “Baby” Pignatari in Mexico in 1960 and kidnapped their two sons. She married Pignatari the following year, but in 1964 he sent a friend to ask her for a divorce. “Perhaps because of the publicity” from her “turbulent private life,” she found opportunities in fashion and film, said The Washington Post. Her outfits launched trends, and she became known as the “Pinup Princess” for her often sultry film roles. She stopped acting in 1974 and ran the perfume division for Valentino, then turned to making artworks of granite, crystal, and gold. Though she maintained homes across Europe, “my only real home is on airplanes,” she said in 2019. “I spend so much time going from country to country that my children suspect that I’m really a flight attendant.”