Nadine de Rothschild

Origins and early life

Nadine de Rothschild was born Nadine Nelly Jeannette Vanrossem at Saint-Quentin on 18 April 1932, to an unmarried mother, and took the surname Lhopitalier when her mother married; she grew up in two rooms without running water.

Work and career

She worked as a film actress between 1949 and 1963 under the name Nadine Tallier, appearing in more than forty films in secondary parts. Raised a Catholic, she studied Judaism for two years before marrying Baron Edmond de Rothschild in 1963, and her conversion was formalised by Jacob Kaplan, the chief rabbi of France; she entered the Jewish people by the route the law of return and Jewish law alike recognise, which is why she appears in this directory.

She then became a public figure of a wholly different kind, the author of etiquette and conduct manuals whose Le Bonheur de séduire, published in 1991, sold some hundred and seventy thousand copies, and a familiar presence on French television. She has worked for the family's philanthropic foundations and for the Château Clarke vineyard in the Médoc. Her son Benjamin de Rothschild ran the family's Swiss bank until his death in 2021.