In 1947 she went to school in Switzerland, moving to London in 1950. Soon afterwards, in classic fairytale fashion, she was summoned to Tehran to meet the new Shah, who was smitten after seeing photographs of her. They were engaged three days after their first meeting. The wedding was delayed after Soraya caught typhoid; she became the Shah’s second wife in February 1951.
Apart from a three-day exile to Rome after Mossadegh’s short-lived coup in August 1953, the couple led an apparently blissful existence over the next few years. Soraya chaired the Red Lion (the Iranian equivalent of the Red Cross) and busied herself with charitable work, creating the Soraya Foundation to educate poor girls. In 1954 she met US President Eisenhower and in February 1955 travelled to London to meet Queen Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill.
But Soraya’s childlessness became a big issue after the death of the Shah’s heir, his brother Ali-Reza, in a plane crash in October 1954. In February 1958 she was dispatched to Switzerland with her jewellery collection and the presents and souvenirs received from the Shah; their divorce was announced a month later.
She embarked on a jetset existence, flitting between Rome, Munich and Marbella, interspersed with a short-lived career as a film actress and a tragic idyll with actor Franco Indovina, who was killed in a plane crash in 1972. She settled in Paris in 1976, dying in her de luxe Avenue Montaigne apartment – a stone’s throw from the venue for her estate auction – on 25 October 2001, aged 69.
Portrait of the sad-eyed princess
Princess Soraya’s father Khalil lived for much of the 1920s in Germany, where he married Soraya’s Russian-born mother Eva Karl in 1926. Soraya was born in Ispahan in 1932, but lived in Germany until she was five, returning to Iran in 1937.
