Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ Sister, Dead at 85

Lee Radziwill, a fashion icon and the younger sister of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died Friday in New York, her family said. She was 85 years old.

Sources close to Radziwill told Women’s Wear Daily she was still in good shape and “extremely present” during the past week.

“It’s a natural end of a marvelous life,” designer Valentino Garavani told WWD. “She had everything a woman can desire…beauty, intelligence, style, fame.…I am sure she had moments of happiness, too.”

Radziwill was born Caroline Lee Bouvier on March 3, 1933 to Janet Norton Lee and John Vernou Bouvier III. She had three careers, starting off with a brief but failed stint as an actress during the 1960s. She found more success in the design world, first as an interior designer and then as brand ambassador and public relations executive for Giorgio Armani.

“She was an extremely elegant women,” Armani told WWD. “When I met her in the early Eighties, I had the impression that she represented a very contemporary irony about American aristocracy, which is almost impossible to define. It is one that combined ease and sophistication, spontaneity and respect for the rules.”

Radziwill became known as a fashion icon thanks to an elegance that emerged from her own personal style and work as an interior decorator. As a socialite, she was known for her kindness and humor. Massimo Ferragamo, chairman of Salvatore Ferragamo USA, called her “one of the most elegant women I have ever known, with innate class and intelligence that made her a unique and admirable person.”

Radziwill was married three times. She married Michael Temple Canfield in 1953, and their marriage ended in divorce six years later. In 1959, she married Polish aristocrat Prince Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill, and their marriage ended in divorce in 1974. In 1988, Radziwill married film director Herbert Ross and they divorced shortly before his death in 2001.

Radziwill had two children with Prince Radziwill, the late television executive Anthony Radziwill, who died in 1999, and daughter Christina Radziwill.

Radziwill also wrote books about her life, including Happy Times and Lee. Her friends included Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Jacobs and Cecil Beaton.

Mathilde Favier, the public relations director for Christian Dior and another of Radziwill’s friends, mourned Radziwill on Instagram.

“She was tough and severe, but she was also sad and lonely and certainly one of the most elegant and tasteful lady on earth, always so keen on details and knowing to adapt herself to any circumstances,” Favier wrote. “She [taught] me a lot.”

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