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French-born fashion icon, socialite, and film actress who was a first cousin of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II.
Best known as Natalie Paley, she was born Countess Natalia Pavlovna von Hohenfelsen in Paris, France. Her father was Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, and her mother was his morganatic wife, Olga Karnovich, who had been granted a Bavarian title, Countess von Hohenfelsen. Her mother was later created Her Serene Highness Princess Paley by her brother-in-law, Nicholas II, and the children of the marriage took the name Paley. She had two half-siblings from her father`s previous marriage to Alexandra of Greece: Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, who was one of the murderers of Rasputin and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, who married Prince Wilehlm of Sweden at age sixteen.
She escaped from Russia in 1920; her father and her brother Vladimir Paley were murdered by the Bolsheviks. With her mother and her sister, Irina Pavlovna, she went via Finland to exile in France.
In 1927 Natalie Paley became the second wife of Lucien-Camille Lelong, the French fashion designer and war hero; they were divorced in 1937. After working for a while as a fashion model for her husband`s enterprises, and appearing frequently in Vogue, she became a movie actress and took parts in several European movies, including Sir Alexander Korda`s The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) and Marcel L`Herbier`s L`epervier (1933). She eventually moved to the United States, and acted in George Cukor`s Sylvia Scarlett (1935), where she began a close friendship with the film`s main star, Katharine Hepburn, which would last through her life.
She had a brief affair with the writer Jean Cocteau, which resulted in an aborted pregnancy.[1]
After charming spectators with her beauty, and experiencing a brief success, she quit acting, married in 1937 the theatre producer John Chapman Wilson, who was a former lover of Cole Porter, and settled with him in Manhattan. There, for many years, she worked in public relations for the fashion designer Mainbocher.
She died in New York City and is buried in the churchyard of the First Presbyterian Church in Ewing, New Jersey.
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At twelve, French girls were still reading Robinson Crusoe and watching Douglas Fairbanks movies. At twelve, I was taking some bread to my father in jail. How could I have been like them? I was mute, I would not play. But I was reading a lot. I had faced death, so close. My father, my brother, my cousins, my uncles, executed, all Romanoff`s blood splashed on my adolescence. This gave me a taste for sad things, poetry, the icy and lightning antechamber of death. Soon, my classmates understood me. And respected the way I was, as strange as it have may seemed
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