Princess Tiger Eyes

The higher the hair, the closer to god...

From the Telegraph:

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 Francesco “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.

The Agnelli money permitted her to lead a life of peripatetic glamour, with houses in Mayfair, 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 (1968), 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”...

When the parts dried up, Princess Ira merely moved on - running the fashion house Valentino’s perfume division, and using her influence in the world of haute couture to bolster the career of her protégé Karl Lagerfeld. In later life she became a renowned artist and sculptor, whose works sold for thousands to the latter-day "jet-set".

What a woman! What a life!

RIP, Princess Ira von Fürstenberg (17th April 1940 - 18th February 2024)