Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, who has died aged 83, was an Italian socialite, B-movie actress and fashion model, whose “profile of Renaissance beauty and fascination, like the portraits of young noblewomen in the Uffizi” was celebrated in 1960s Vogue.
A niece of Gianni Agnelli and the epitome of the jet set, Ira von Fürstenberg had, by the time she was 20, already been married to two of the 20th century’s most notorious playboys, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, the so-called “King of Clubs” who invented the resort of Marbella (and jealously refused Salvador Dalí’s request to paint Ira naked), and the Brazilian industrialist Francisco “Baby” Pignatari.
She was only 15 at the time of her first marriage, and needed special dispensation from the Pope to wed von Hohenlohe, 31, who had proposed to her by telegram after seeing her in a vision as he crawled clear of the wreckage of a plane crash. Ira the child-bride made the cover of Life magazine in 1955, leading a flotilla of 130 gondolas to the church in Venice. Her mother’s family company, Fiat, gave them a red Cinquecento, wrapped up and tied with a bow.
Five years later, by now neglected and disenchanted, she eloped with the 44-year-old Pignatari. Von Hohenlohe sent armed policemen to catch the couple in flagrante in a hotel in Mexico City, and there was a fight. Then von Hohenlohe kidnapped their two sons, and went on the run for two and a half years, occasionally dressing the boys in wigs and dirndls to pass them off as girls, to evade the princess’s million-dollar reward offered to anyone who could find them.
Her 1961 marriage to Pignatari in Reno ended in divorce in Las Vegas in 1964, after he sent a friend to tell her: “Baby wants to leave you.” As her son Hubertus later put it: “She had got caught up in a man’s world as half a child.” She steered clear of matrimony thereafter, although in the 1980s she seemed close to becoming the second wife of her cousin, Prince Rainier of Monaco, after the death of Grace Kelly.
By the time she was 20, she had already been married to two of the 20th century’s most notorious playboys.
The Agnelli money permitted her to lead a life of peripatetic glamour, with houses in London, Madrid, on the shores of Lake Geneva, on the Via Veneto in Rome, where she had avant-garde Perspex furniture, and in the Place Vendôme in Paris, where she had solid gold bath taps. (“Everybody has to see something beautiful in the morning in order to have a good day,” she said.) She told her biographer, Nick Foulkes, however, that “my only real home is on aeroplanes. I spend so much time going from country to country that my children suspect that I’m really a flight attendant.”
It was on a plane in 1966 that she met the producer Dino De Laurentiis, who saw star potential in her famous tawny eyes (“princess tiger eyes”, her first husband called her). Her film debut was the James Bond spoof Matchless (1967), co-starring Patrick O’Neal and Donald Pleasence, and she went on to grace the screen in a string of “sex kitten” roles, playing opposite Anthony Quinn, Peter Lawford, Klaus Kinski and Walter Chiari; she was even screen-tested by Roger Vadim for the lead in Barbarella.
She declined to star in one of Tinto Brass’s erotic movies, but as a rule, over her 29 film and television roles, she was content to wear very little, reassuring her anxious father that “for the moment my acting does not have the same power to make people flock to the cinema as my body”.
Gina Lollobrigida, Ira claimed, was threatened by her long legs (she was 5ft 11in tall). A seasoned mannequin, who had first modeled swimwear for Emilio Pucci aged 13, she was seized upon by the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland as one of her “beautiful people”, photographed by Helmut Newton and Irving Penn, and later walked the runway in a Mondrian dress for Yves Saint Laurent. In 1965 she had been crowned “Lady Europe”.
Her film roles included The Battle of El Alamein, Playgirl, a heist film called The Vatican Affair, a spaghetti western called Deaf Smith & Johnny Ears and the box-office smash Homo Eroticus, about a man with three testicles. She aspired to be taken seriously as an actress, but in the 1970s she gave up acting in frustration, after her big break – a scene in Franco Zeffirelli’s St Francis of Assisi epic Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), in which she hid her glamour under a massive perm – ended up on the cutting-room floor. A proposed biopic of Gabriele D’Annunzio came to nothing, and her final role was as a left-wing journalist, with hair closely cropped, in the drama Processo per Direttissima (1974).
By then the fun had gone out of the film industry, as La Dolce Vita gave way to the “Years of Lead”. Princess Ira turned her back on Rome, setting up the Manila Film Festival with her friend Imelda Marcos and leveraging her celebrity to run the fashion house Valentino’s perfume division and establish the career of her protégé Karl Lagerfeld.
She had begun to reinvent herself as an artist in the 1990s, confecting esoteric and mysterious works from porphyry, crystal and gold, redolent of imperial Rome and the Renaissance Wunderkammer, when she lost, in short succession, her brother Egon (husband of the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg) in 2004, and her troubled elder son, Kiko, who died of organ failure in a Thai jail after attending a brutal “fat camp” in 2006.
She was seized upon by the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland as one of her “beautiful people.”
The two untimely deaths, she told Foulkes, “made it clear to me that a life without purpose is no life, and from that time I dedicated myself seriously to the work of creating my objects”. Her works, such as a porphyry skull in a golden laurel crown, and gold mice dancing on porphyry obelisks, were collected by Leonardo DiCaprio, Didier Drogba, Oscar de la Renta, King Juan Carlos of Spain and Albert II of Monaco, among others, and she went on to hold more than 100 exhibitions, notably at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris in 2014 and the Museo Correr in Venice in 2018.
Princess Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galdina von Fürstenberg was born on April 17 1940 in Rome, the middle of three children of Prince Tassilo von Fürstenberg, a relatively poor scion of the Austro-Hungarian princely house, who organized hunting trips, and the heiress Clara Agnelli. They spent the war years in Lausanne, then settled in Venice.
Clara Agnelli caused a scandal by running away with Count Giovanni Nuvoletti, whom she had loved since she was 12, and was arrested at the airport, since adultery was a crime. Ira was packed off to boarding school at St Leonards-on-Sea, even though she did not speak any English, then the École Vinet in Lausanne, and then Cygnets House finishing school in London, where, at the age of 14, she sat for Cecil Beaton.
In her film star years, De Laurentiis had insisted that she lose 22 lbs, and years of her life were blighted by obsessive dieting. “I was four kilos [nine pounds] thinner – and so what? I was too boring and bored to enjoy being svelte,” she told Foulkes.
Later, the publisher George Weidenfeld – another admirer – commissioned her to write a book about the beauty secrets of the jet set, entitled Young at Any Age. She was described in the Telegraph’s obituary of Prince Alfonso as “a pioneer of the surgical bottom-lift”. She also published Tartanware (1996), about her collection of Scottish antiques.
In 2019, Nick Foulkes published her biography, Ira.
Ira von Fürstenberg is survived by her younger son, Prince Hubertus von Hohenlohe, a photographer and musician (under the stage names Andy Himalaya and Royal Disaster), who skied for Mexico in six Olympics.
Princess Ira von Fürstenberg was born in Rome in 1940. She died on February 19
