Her funeral was held on February 23rd in her birthplace of Rome, but the cause of death has not been made public.
In an interview with the Financial Times last year, Ms von Fürstenberg was asked to recall the best advice she ever received. She said it’s about “learning how to say no.”
“But it’s a lesson,” she added, “I never learned.”
This was what defined her life, full of incredible privilege, heartbreak and tragedy, played out in glossy magazines and gossip columns on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1950s onwards. Her biographer, the British writer Nicholas Foulkes, often states in various ways:
She came to the attention of the film world in films such as the spy film Matchless (1967) and the spaghetti western Deaf Smith and Johnny Years (1973), co-starring Anthony Quinn. She appeared on the pages of Vogue, was photographed by fashion giant Helmut Newton, and walked the runway wearing a Yves Saint Laurent Mondrian dress.
She helped launch the career of designer Karl Lagerfeld. She danced with Frank Sinatra. She hosted a film festival in Manila with Imelda Marcos. Salvador Dali once asked someone to paint him nude. he was rejected.
“I was a little girl who had just gotten married and was still in the honeymoon phase, so I wasn’t tempted at all,” von Fürstenberg recalled in 2019.
She inherited the title of princess from a title with Austro-Hungarian roots. Her family also had wealth and connections these days. Her mother was from Turin’s powerful Agnelli family, which included the Fiat automobile fortune. (The von Fürstenberg name would be further recognized by fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, who married Mr. von Fürstenberg’s brother Egon.)
As a teenager, Ira von Fürstenberg met Alfonso von, one of Europe’s most famous rakes, known as the “King of Clubs” and the mastermind behind turning the sleepy Spanish fishing village of Marbella into an upmarket hotspot. -She was proposed to be married to Prince Hohenlohe-Langenburg. (He also introduced the VW Beetle to the Latin American market.)
After surviving a private plane crash in rural Connecticut in 1954, the prince claimed to have seen her in a hallucination and proposed to her via telegram.
Von Fürstenberg’s family needed special permission from the Vatican to allow the 15-year-old to marry Alfonso, who was more than twice her age. When the couple arrived in Venice for their 1955 wedding, they arrived in a gondola, with Ms. von Fürstenberg’s veil flowing down to the foot of the gondola.
The photo was published in Life magazine. Italian newspapers breathlessly called the event “the wedding of the century.” Agnelli presented the bride and groom with a specially made red Cinquecento. During the couple’s trip after their wedding, the surrealist master Dali commissioned Ms. von Fürstenberg to paint her nude body.
The marriage soon began to unravel. In 1960, von Hohenlohe found his girlfriend in Mexico City with Francesco “Baby” Pignatari, a businessman from São Paulo. Pignatari was once described by Time magazine as having “the undisputed title of Brazil’s Champion Playboy.” Ms. von Hohenlohe was on the run with her two sons, and from time to time he took the girls’ bodies to avoid private detectives and others who wanted to return the children to Ms. von Fürstenberg and claim the bounty. Made me look good. (The two then agreed to split custody.)
Ms. von Fürstenberg was divorced in Mexico and married Pignatari, 23 years her senior, in Reno in 1961. At one point, Ms. von Fürstenberg appeared in Milan and “dispelled strange rumors circulating on the international stage that she had died,” King Features Syndicate’s Susie Says column said. It pointed out.
While in Las Vegas in 1964, a friend of Mr. Pignatari’s sent a message to Ms. von Furstenberg saying, “The baby wants to leave you,” a journalist at the time reported. The divorce was finalized quickly.
But to see Ms von Fürstenberg only as fodder for gossip pages is to miss the whole picture, says her illustrated biography, Islay: The Life and Times of a Princess, published in 2019. says Fawkes, author of . He often pointed out that during her heyday in the world of film and fashion, she was one of the influential figures.
What she did, wore, and said helped spark trends. Designer Valentino recognized her influence enough to appoint her head of perfumery in the 1970s.
“Her recognition in a pre-Internet world was quite remarkable,” Folkes told Women’s Wear Daily.
In 1987, rumors began to circulate that Ms. von Fürstenberg was planning to marry Princess Grace’s widow, Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Ms von Fürstenberg dismissed this speculation as false. “We’re just friends,” she said of her relationship with her prince.
That didn’t stop Britain’s Princess Margaret from pursuing the possibility of Mr von Fürstenberg getting married in Monaco. “She’s a very big girl for such a small country,” she was quoted as saying.
Virginia Carolina Teresa Pancrazia Gardina zu Fürstenberg was born on April 17, 1940 in Rome. Her father was a descendant of the royal family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her mother was a member of the Agnelli automotive dynasty.
The family spent World War II in Lausanne, Switzerland, and then settled in Venice. Young Ira spent time at boarding schools in England and Switzerland.
After her second divorce, and still in her mid-twenties, she met Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis on a plane. Although she had no acting experience, De Laurentiis later said she saw star potential. She starred as a “beautiful but frightening” secret agent in Matchless, which she co-produced with De Laurentiis. She starred in more than 25 films and developed a reputation for her risqué, almost sensual characters, but she drew the line at appearing naked.
“Right now, my acting doesn’t have the power to bring people to the theater the way my body does,” he reportedly told his father early in his film career.
Some filmmakers began calling her a “pin-up princess.” In late 1966, De Laurentiis leaked the results of a screen test in which Ms. von Fürstenberg was being considered for the lead role in “Barbarella.” A science fiction masterpiece released in 1968. Jane Fonda played the role, and her husband Roger Vadim was the director.
“I didn’t really want the role,” von Furstenberg told UPI.
She said she began to tire of acting after a scene in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 epic about St. Francis of Assisi was cut. Her last film appearance was in 1982.
In the 1990s, she began creating enigmatic works of art that she called “unique objects,” such as a porphyry skull wearing a golden laurel wreath and a figure of a golden rat dancing on an obelisk. Some of her work has been exhibited in exhibitions around the world.
While Rome became her main base, she moved frequently between residences in London, Madrid, the shores of Lake Geneva, and Paris, where her bathroom had solid gold faucets. However, her tastes may also be quite ordinary. “My fridge always has Coke Zero and Emmental cheese,” she once said.
Survivors include a son, Hubertus von Hohenlohe, a photographer and musician who represented Mexico six times in the Olympics. Her son, Christophe Victorio Egon Humberto, died in a Thai prison in 2006 after being charged with illegally changing his visa. He was reportedly suffering from health problems after a grueling weight loss program in Thailand.
At a book signing for her biography in London in 2019, Vogue magazine journalists spoke of von Fürstenberg by mentioning notable designers, artists, directors and other celebrities of the past half century. I tried to encourage him to talk.
Von Fürstenberg said there wasn’t enough time at the book event to start sharing memories. “I knew them all,” she said.
