[Actrice] Ira von Fürstenberg

[Rex Lee]

La princesse Virginia (Ira) von Fürstenberg est née le 8 avril 1940 à Rome.

Elle est dans un western italien:




Los Amigos




Hors western:

   1967 : J'ai tué Raspoutine  
   1967 : Deux billets pour Mexico
   1967 : Mission T.S. (Matchless)  : Arabella
   1968 : Casse au Vatican





   1969 : La Bataille d'El Alamein : Marta






   1970 : L'île de l'épouvante




   1970 : Hello-Goodbye
   1971 : Journée noire pour un bélier
   1982 : Plus beau que moi, tu meurs

[Tom Betts]

https://wwd.com/fashion-news/designer-luxury/princess-ira-von-furstenberg-dead-1236202486/

Ira von Fürstenberg, Death of a Princess
A princess by birth and model, actress and designer by choice, von Fürstenberg, the niece of Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli, died on Monday aged 83.

Women's Wear Daily
By Luisa Zargani
February 20, 2024

MILAN – According to British writer Nick Foulkes, Ira von Fürstenberg “was big in her day and her ways, as somebody like the Kardashians are today.” A princess by birth and model, actress and designer by choice, von Fürstenberg died on Monday aged 83. Her full name read Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galdina zu Fürstenberg.

Fascinated by her aristocratic heritage, colorful life and influence in the fashion and art worlds, Foulkes in 2019 penned the book “Ira: The Life and Times of a Princess” on her life growing up in Venice, her fairytale wedding in Venice to Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe at 15 years old, her glamorous travels and fashion magazine shoots, and her glitzy Place Vendôme apartment post-divorce.

“The awareness about her in a world that was pre-Internet was quite astonishing. The volume of newspaper cuttings I went through was quite extraordinary,” Foulkes told WWD at the time.

She was the daughter of Clara Agnelli, who was the sister of Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli. Von Fürstenberg’s father, Prince Tassilo von Fürstenberg, was the son of a Hungarian countess and a prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and her maternal grandmother was Princess Virginia San Faustino, an American.

When her marriage to Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe, the jetsetting playboy who turned the sleepy fishing village of Marbella into a glamorous resort in the 1950s, was over – creating a major scandal at the time as she was also accused of adultery – von Fürstenberg married the Brazilian playboy-industrialist Francisco Matarazzo “Baby” Pignatari, 23 years her senior, in Reno, Nevada in 1961, but that ended in a divorce as well – in Las Vegas after three years.

In his biography, Foulkes recounted her struggles with motherhood and marriage and the tragedy in 2006 of losing her son Christoph in a prison in Bangkok, aged 50, accused of having counterfeited a visa to enter the country to save time. Her other son, Hubertus, became a ski Olympian for Mexico.

“She’s got this rebellious streak and was a very independent woman at a time where it was still a very masculine world. She took a lot of decisions that were considered brave in those days,” writes Foulkes.

She defied conventions as an adolescent model for Emilio Pucci, occasionally walking the runways and posing for Helmut Newton and Cecil Beaton. “Ira was a great family friend and knew my father since she was 14 years old,” said Emilio’s daughter Laudomia Pucci.

Von Fürstenberg was a couture client, Diana Vreeland’s darling, and championed Karl Lagerfeld during the early stages in his career. She became a P.R. for Valentino and was rumored to become Prince Rainier of Monaco’s second wife after the death of Grace Kelly.

“I’ve known Ira forever, we even worked together on my first perfume,” said Valentino Garavani. “Beautiful and always smiling, Ira possessed an unwavering passion for everything she did set her mind to. Whether it was her work, her hobbies, or her personal pursuits, she approached each endeavor with wholehearted enthusiasm and dedication.”

Diane von Furstenberg, who was her sister-in-law through her first marriage to Egon von Furstenberg, said, “When I first met Egon, she was the famous sister. She had gotten married in Venice and was a movie star. She was the big sister and the aunt to my children.”

“She was part of Italy’s jet set,” said von Furstenberg. “She was very gregarious. She was a lot of fun and loved to laugh. She never complained,” she said. She said that last week when she herself was in Venice, Ira von Furstenberg’s son came to visit and they talked with her.

She added that the last 20 years she was designing beautiful objects in stone. “I have several pieces actually,” said von Furstenberg.

She pursued an acting career under the aegis of the famous producer Dino di Laurentiis, racking up around 30 movies in the late 1960s and ‘70s.

Over the years, she collected art by Roy Lichtenstein, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Josef Albers and Yves Klein.

Traveling around the world, spending her life between Paris, Biarritz and London, after abandoning acting, she started designing home décor objects, many of them combined with gems and semiprecious stones. She made more than 800 one-of-a-kind pieces, each signed and numbered — vases, boxes, Indian jeweled handmirrors, picture frames, bookends, animal figurines and trays, for example, which made it into the New York’s Chinese Porcelain Company and the Thyssen Museum.

She said she began designing when she couldn’t find a gift she liked for her friends Anne and Kirk Douglas, so she decided to make one.

Among her several charity initiatives, she was a patron of the Children of Africa Foundation.