西班牙最奇葩女公爵去世生前是八卦杂志常客_BEC初级作文

西班牙最奇葩女公爵去世生前是八卦杂志常客

With her cloud of white hair and face moulded by plastic surgery, she was rarely out of the Spanish gossip magazines, most recently on the arm of her third husband, 24 years her junior.

Head of one of Spain's oldest aristocratic families dating back to the 1400s, and the third woman to hold the title of Duchess of Alba in her own right, her wealth is estimated at between 600 million and 3.5 billion euros.

"I don't like to talk about money. Many people confuse having cash with having assets - we've never had a lot of cash," she wrote in her autobiography.

Many of the palaces, castles and works of art belonging to the House of Alba have restrictions placed on their sale because of their historic importance for Spain.

The 13th Duchess of Alba was a muse of artist Francisco Goya in the 18th century and is rumored to be the subject of 'La Maja Desnuda', his famous portrait of a reclining nude which hangs in Madrid's Prado gallery.

The duchess tells in her autobiography of how Spanish artist Pablo Picasso asked her to pose nude to recreate the painting, but her conservative first husband forbade it.

Born in 1926 in a neoclassical palace in Madrid, she spent much of her childhood in London when her father was ambassador to Britain and where she dined with Winston Churchill and played with Princess Margaret.

Her father, an Anglophile and royalist, sided with dictator Francisco Franco at the beginning of Spain's Civil War but relations grew frosty as it became clear Franco would not reinstate a king as head of Spain.