Cécile de Rothschild

Origins and early life

Cécile de Rothschild was born in the eighth arrondissement of Paris on 15 March 1913, daughter of Baron Robert de Rothschild, president of the Israelite Consistory of Paris, and of Gabrielle Nelly Beer, in the French Jewish banking family; her brother and sisters were Diane, Élie and Alain.

Work and career

She became one of the first women in France to play golf at a professional level, winning the Vilmorin Cup in 1938 against Jacqueline Carpentier and the Gaveau Cup in 1956, and playing for the French national team for close to two decades — a sporting career interrupted by the war, which drove her family from France under the antisemitic laws and stripped it of its property. She was also a collector: in 1947 she and her siblings gave Gainsborough's portrait of Lady Alston to the Louvre, and in 1963 she became the first woman elected to the administrative council of the Society of Friends of the Louvre.

In 1956, at a dinner in New York, she met Greta Garbo, and the two women were companions until Garbo's death in 1990, travelling together and largely out of sight of the press. She died on 17 January 1995, at eighty-one.