THE QUEEN OF CLUBS
Born Princess Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galdina von Furstenberg, she was always known as Ira. She was born in Rome just a few days before Italy joined the Second World War.
Ira’s father was Prince Tassilo von Furstenberg, a minor member of the Austro-Hungarian royal family. Her mother was Clara Agnelli, part of the FIAT owning dynasty.
Ira was the middle of three children, with brothers Egon and Sebastian. When the war started, the family moved to Lausanne in neutral Switzerland.
After the war, the family moved to Venice.
Then, her mother Clara caused a national scandal. She ran away with Count Giovanni Nuvoletti, whom she had been in love with since she was a child. The runaways were arrested at the airport as adultery was a crime in Italy.
Ira was immediately sent to boarding school in Sussex, even though she could not speak a word of English. After that, it was a finishing school in London.
Ira was fluent in Spanish, Italian, French, German, and eventually, English.
Known for her beauty, she first modelled swimwear aged just thirteen.
On her fifteenth birthday, Ira was photographed by Cecil Beaton.

That same year, Ira got married. She needed special dispensation from the Pope. Her husband was the notorious 31-year-old playboy, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, known as ‘The King of Clubs’. He was famous for founding the resort of Marbella.
Alfonso proposed to Ira by telegram, never having met her. He had survived a plane crash and as he crawled from the wreckage, he claimed to have seen her in a vision.
Ira had very striking tawny-coloured eyes. Alfonso always called her ‘Princess Tiger Eyes’.
The wedding was featured on the front cover of Life Magazine. They called it ‘the wedding of the year’ and dubbed her the ‘Queen of Clubs’. The couple led a flotilla of 130 gondolas to the church in Venice.
Ira’s wedding present from her mother was a red Fiat Cinquecento, wrapped up in paper and tied with a bow.

The wedding was also on the cover of Paris Match.
Ira later said that her parents had threatened to disown her and put her in a convent if she had refused to get married.
Salvador Dali approached Alfonso, during their honeymoon, with a request to paint Ira naked, but the couple turned him down. Ira said, “I was a little girl who just got married and was still in in the honeymoon period.”
During this time, she was able to dance with Frank Sinatra – something she never forgot.
The couple officially lived in Mexico City, but spent most of their time in Spain. There, they opened the Marbella Club, for rich and famous clients. “Marbella back then was a wild party where you came and went with different people”.
Whilst in Mexico, Alfonso introduced the VW Beetle to the country.

Despite having two sons, Christoph (known as Kiko) and Hubertus, the marriage was not a success, as Alfonso continued his playboy lifestyle, neglecting his young wife.
Ira eloped with 44-year-old Brazilian industrialist Francesco ‘Baby’ Pignatari, returning to Mexico City.
Alfonso sent armed policemen after Ira and Pignatari, and there was an almighty fight in a hotel room.
Then, Alfonso kidnapped the two boys and went on the run with them. Ira made desperate attempts to track down her sons, offering a million-dollar reward to anybody who could find them.
This was not easy because Alfonso dressed the boys as girls in order to disguise them. They wore dresses and wigs.
Eventually, Ira and Alfonso divorced. She immediately married Pignatari in Reno, Nevada. She had only just turned twenty.
This marriage also failed. She was in Las Vegas when her husband sent a friend to tell her, “Baby wants to leave you.” He didn’t have the courage to tell her himself.
Years later, she admitted Pignatari was the love of her life.
Later, her son said of his mother, Ira, “She had got caught up in a man’s world as half a child”.
Ira had many famous friends such as French actress Brigitte Bardot and Princess Margaret.
Ira never married again, although in the 1980s, her cousin, Prince Rainier of Monaco, purportedly proposed to her after the death of his first wife, Grace Kelly. Princess Margaret, when hearing of this, said, “Such a big girl for such a small country.”

Ira lived a life of luxury, due to the wealth of her Agnelli family. She had houses in Mayfair, Madrid, Paris, on Lake Geneva, and on the Via Veneto in Rome. The home in Rome was bought for her by one of her lovers. The house was full of avant-garde Perspex furniture and her Paris apartment had solid gold bath taps. “Everybody has to see something beautiful in the morning in order to have a good day”.
Ira returned to modelling. Vogue labelled her as one of ‘the beautiful people’. She was photographed by many of the leading photographers of the day and once modelled a Mondrian dress for Yves Saint Laurent, and she was crowned ‘Lady Europe’ for 1965. Ira even appeared on the cover of the magazine.
In 1966, Ira was on a plane journey when she met the film producer Dino De Laurentiis. He immediately saw her star potential, but insisted she lose 10kg. She did so, but it started a lifelong obsession with dieting.
However, in later years she regretted this. “I was thinner – and so what? I was too boring and bored to be svelte.”
Ira’s film debut was in the 1968 James Bond spoof ‘Matchless’, starring alongside Patrick O’Neal and Donald Pleasance.
Ira’s father was absolutely furious with her because she was, “undressed on screen”.
From then on, she played the sex kitten role, often wearing very little. Her co-stars included Anthony Quinn, Peter Lawford, Klaus Kinski and Walter Chiari. She appeared in 29 films and television programmes.
Other film roles included ‘The Battle of El-Alamein, ‘Playgirl’, ‘I Killed Rasputin’, ‘In God’s Day’, ‘The Vatican Affair’ (a heist film), ‘Deaf Ears and Johnny Ears’ (a spaghetti western) and ‘Homo Eroticus’ (a film about a man with three testicles – which was an unexpected box-office hit).

However, when film producer Tinto Brass tried to persuade her to act in his erotic movies, she refused outright.
Ira was screen-tested by Roger Vadim for the lead role in Barbarella, which eventually went to Jane Fonda.
Ira had a fierce rivalry with actress Gina Lollobrigida. She was very tall and claimed Gina was jealous of her long legs.

Ira tried to raise funds (and enthusiasm) for a biopic on the poet and right-wing revolutionary Gabriele D’Annunzio, but nobody was interested.
The most important film Ira acted in was Franco Zeffirelli’s ‘Brother Sun, Sister Moon’. In it, she wore a massive perm, which hid her beauty. However, her scenes were cut out of the film.
Disillusioned by the failure of these last two projects she decided to call time on her career as an actress. “For the moment my acting does not have the same power to make people flock to the cinema as my body”.
She then opened an antiques shop in London.
Ira visited the Philippines to help her close friend, Imelda Marcos, set up the Manila Film Festival.
When Ira returned, she took over the perfume division of the fashion house Valentino’s, and it was there that she discovered, and nurtured the career of Karl Lagerfeld.
She said she loved Karl’s humour and they remained close friends until his death.
In the 1990s, Ira reinvented herself as an artist. Her works were “esoteric and mysterious.” They included a porphyry skull with a golden laurel crown and gold mice dancing on porphyry obelisks.
Ira had over 100 exhibitions.
Publisher George Weidenfeld was a great admirer of hers and encouraged her to write a book about the secrets of the jet set, entitled ‘Young at Any Age’.
Ira followed this up with a book about her collection of Scottish antiques, called ‘Tartanware’.
When her first husband, Alfonso died, in one of his obituaries Ira was described as “A pioneer of the surgical bottom-lift” (Daily Telegraph).
In 2004, her brother Egon (husband of the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg), died. She was deeply upset by this.

Worse was to come. Her oldest son Kiko was deeply troubled. He was arrested in Thailand for altering a visa and was sentenced to a spell in a Thai jail. He died of organ failure in 2006. Although he suffered Type 1 Diabetes, it was considered a ‘suspicious death’.
In her grief, Ira threw herself back into her artwork. The two deaths, “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.”
Collectors of her work include Leonardo DiCaprio, Didier Drogba, Oscar de la Renta, King Juan Carlos of Spain and Prince Albert of Monaco – amongst many others.
She had a famous exhibition in Paris in 2014 and one in Venice in 2018. She also became noted as a jewellery designer.
In her later years, Ira started spending a lot of time back in Marbella.
Ira styled herself, ‘The Princess of Marbella’.
She also became patron to the charity, the Children of Africa Foundation.
In 2019, Nick Foulkes wrote a biography of her entitled simply ‘Ira’.
Ira’s younger son, Hubertus is a photographer (with the working name Andy Himalaya) and rock musician (stage name Royal Disaster). He has also skied for Mexico in six Winter Olympic games. On more than one occasion, he has been the only Mexican athlete competing in the Games.
Ira died in Rome.
At her death, the earlier words of Vogue were recalled – “Her profile of Renaissance beauty and fascination were like the portraits of young noblewomen in the Uffizi.”
RIP – Rich Italian Princess