Apparatus

Despite her grand name and a social circle peopled with tycoons, playboys and European nobles whose convoluted titles, as the Telegraph put it in a 2000 interview with her, “are impossible to say without breathing apparatus”, Princess zu Marianne Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn (1919-2025) was not removed from the harsher realities of life.

When a drunk lorry driver ran over her husband in 1962, she was left a 42-year-old widow with five children to bring up and little money of her own. She was soon, by her own admission, “nearly bankrupt”. It had been an economic necessity to start selling her pictures to gossip magazines – to the envy of the career paparazzi: “The poor people are standing behind the barrier, and I’m stepping over it in my evening dress because I’m invited. I feel very sorry for my colleagues, too, but what can I do?”

She persevered in entertaining on a grand scale, claiming that she had at least 80 people to lunch every Sunday in July and August, but since she could not afford to buy meat for so many she lived off the deer of the forest, serving venison goulash frozen in batches of 500 portions.

Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 12th May, 2025