Her funeral was held on February 23 in Rome, her hometown, but the cause of death was not announced.
In an interview last year with the Financial Times, Ms. von Furstenberg was asked to recall the best advice she had ever received. The goal, she said, is to “learn how to say no.”
“But it's a lesson I never mastered,” she added.
Thus she defined her life of astonishing privilege, as well as heartbreak and tragedy, which appeared in glossy magazines and gossip columns on both sides of the Atlantic beginning in the 1950s. As her biographer, the British author Nicholas Faulks, has often noted in various ways: You can't make this stuff up.
She appeared in cinematic marquees in films such as the spy satire “Matchless” (1967) and the spaghetti western “Deaf Smith & Johnny Ears” (1973) alongside Anthony Quinn. She has appeared in the pages of Vogue, been photographed by fashion titan Helmut Newton, and walked the runway in a Mondrian dress by Yves Saint Laurent.
It helped launch the career of designer Karl Lagerfeld. She danced with Frank Sinatra. She organized a film festival in Manila with Imelda Marcos. Salvador Dali once asked him to paint her naked. It was rejected.
“I haven't felt tempted at all, since I was a young girl who had just gotten married and was still in the honeymoon phase,” Ms. von Furstenberg recalled in 2019.
She held the title of princess from a nobility with Austro-Hungarian roots. Her family also has more recent connections to wealth. Her mother came from the powerful Agnelli family of Turin, which included the Fiat car fortune. (The von Fürstenberg name would come to further recognition from the fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, who married Mrs. von Fürstenberg's brother, Egon.)
As a teenager, Ira von Furstenberg was wooed by one of Europe's most notorious criminals, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, known as the “King of Clubs” and the mastermind behind the transformation of the sleepy Spanish fishing village of Marbella into a luxury attraction. (He also introduced the Volkswagen Beetle to the Latin American market.)
The prince proposed to her by telegram after claiming to have seen her in a vision after surviving a private plane crash in rural Connecticut in 1954.
Mrs. von Furstenberg's family needed special permission from the Vatican to allow the 15-year-old to marry Alfonso, who was more than twice her age. The couple arrived for a 1955 wedding in Venice aboard a gondola with Mrs. von Furstenberg's veil flowing back to the feet of the gondola.
Al-Hayat magazine published the photos. Italian newspapers eagerly described the event as “the wedding of the century.” From Agnelli's side, the newlyweds received a custom-made red Cinquecento. During the couple's travels after the wedding, the surrealist master Dalí made a request to paint Mrs. von Furstenberg nude.
The marriage soon began to deteriorate. In 1960, von Hohenlohe found her in Mexico City with a São Paulo industrialist named Francisco “Pepe” Pignatari, whom Time magazine once described as holding “the title of Brazil’s undisputed playboy champion.” Von Hohenlohe took their two sons and, as they fled, sometimes dressed them as girls to avoid private investigators and others seeking to return the children to Mrs. von Furstenberg and claim the reward. (They later agreed to split custody.)
Mrs. von Fürstenberg obtained a divorce in Mexico and married Pignatari, 23 years her senior, in Reno in 1961. At some point, Mrs. von Fürstenberg appeared in Milan, which “dispelled the strange rumors spreading through the international group that she was ‘dead,’” he noted. Suzy Says column published by King Features Syndicate.
While in Las Vegas in 1964, one of Pignatari's friends delivered a message to Mrs. von Furstenberg: “My darling wants to leave you,” reporters reported at the time. The divorce was quickly finalized.
To see Ms. von Furstenberg only as fodder for the gossip pages is to miss the full picture, said Foulkes, author of the 2019 graphic narrative biography “Ira: The Life and Times of a Princess.” It is often noted that she was among the influential figures during her heyday in the world of cinema and fashion.
What she did, what she wore, what she said helped spark trends. The designer Valentino recognized her influence enough to put her in charge of the perfume department in the 1970s.
“The awareness of it in the pre-internet world was absolutely amazing,” Foulkes told Women's Wear Daily.
In 1987, rumors began to circulate that Mrs. von Furstenberg might marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco, the widower of Princess Grace, the former Grace Kelly. Ms. von Furstenberg described these speculations as false. “Just friends,” she said of her relationship with the prince.
But that did not prevent British Princess Margaret from talking about the possibilities of Mrs. von Furstenberg marrying in Monaco. “Such a big girl, for such a small country,” she was quoted as saying.
Virginia Carolina Teresa Pancrazia Galdina zu Furstenberg was born on April 17, 1940 in Rome. Her father was a descendant of an Austro-Hungarian princely line. Her mother was part of the Agnelli automotive and industrial dynasty.
The family spent World War II in Lausanne, Switzerland, and then settled in Venice. Young Ira spent time in English and Swiss boarding schools.
After her second divorce – when she was only in her mid-twenties – she met Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis on a plane. She had no acting experience, but De Laurentiis later said he saw star potential. She was cast in the starring role as a “beautiful but deadly” secret agent in the film “Matchless,” which was co-produced by De Laurentiis. Over the course of more than 25 films, she developed a reputation as sexy characters bordering on explicitness, but she drew the line at appearing nude.
“Right now, my acting doesn't have the same ability to make people flock to the cinema as my body does,” she was quoted as saying to her father early in her film career.
Some film writers began calling her the “Pinup Princess.” In late 1966, De Laurentiis leaked word from screen tests that Ms. von Furstenberg was a candidate for the lead role in “Barbarella.” A science fiction film released in 1968. The part went to Jane Fonda, whose husband Roger Vadim was the director.
“I didn’t really want the role,” Ms. von Furstenberg told UPI.
She said she started to get worse at acting after her scene in Franco Zeffirelli's epic about St. Francis of Assisi, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” (1972), was cut. Her last film credit was in 1982.
In the 1990s, she began crafting mysterious artworks that she called “unique objects,” such as a porphyry skull in a golden laurel crown or figures of golden mice dancing on obelisks. Some of her work has appeared in galleries around the world.
While Rome began as her home base, she moved frequently between residences in London, Madrid, on Lake Geneva, and Paris, where her bathroom had solid gold faucets. However, her tastes can be very ordinary. “In my refrigerator, you'll always find Coca-Cola Zero and Emmental cheese,” she once said.
Survivors include his son Hubertus von Hohenlohe, a photographer and musician who represented Mexico as a skier in six Olympics. Her son, Christophe Victorio Egon Humberto, died in 2006 in a Thai prison after being accused of illegally changing his visa. He was reportedly suffering from health problems after following a strict weight loss program in Thailand.
At a book signing for her autobiography in London in 2019, a Vogue journalist tried to elicit some stories from Ms. von Furstenberg by mentioning a range of notable designers, artists, directors and other celebrities from the past half-century.
Ms. von Furstenberg noted that there was not enough time at the book event to begin reminiscing. “I knew them all,” she said.
