The death of Jocelyne Wildenstein, a jet-set figure married for twenty years to a wealthy art dealer, was announced this Wednesday by her long-time companion. “Lloyd Klein is saddened to announce the death of Jocelyne Wildenstein in Paris, at the age of 79,” he said.
Jocelyne Wildenstein was born Perisset, in Lausanne (Switzerland), on September 7, 1945. But her birth year is controversial, with some media saying she was born in 1940, a confusion with the birth year of her ex-husband, Alec Wildenstein, she explained recently on the sets.
Welcoming the departure of an “icon”, Lloyd Klein specified that she died a few hours before New Year’s Eve on December 31 and was found in the suite of a Parisian palace where they had settled in August. “Initial reports from doctors called to the scene indicate that she suffered heart failure and died peacefully in her sleep,” he said in a statement released late in the day.
Legends around his transformation
Followed by 1.1 million subscribers on Instagram, Jocelyne Wildenstein was known for her numerous facial cosmetic procedures and the legends surrounding her transformation.
Living between New York and Miami, she had recently given several interviews in France, where she looked back on her journey. “When you look in the mirror, it’s for yourself,” she said, in response to a legend according to which she had resorted to surgery to please her husband or to look like a cat. Legend which earned her the nickname “Catwoman” in the Anglo-Saxon world. “My (ex-)husband thought it was a very good advertisement to broadcast during the divorce,” she said in the fall in a program presented by Cyril Hanouna. At the microphone of host Jordan de Luxe, on the C8 channel, she declared that her ex-husband had notably spread rumors of operations by a surgeon whom she had never consulted.
“$2.5 billion” divorce
The only daughter of a bourgeois family, she discovered New York high society by marrying this millionaire art dealer specializing in impressionism, whose surname she kept after their divorce and with whom she had two children, Alec Jr. and Diana. By divorcing, she obtained the sum of “2.5 billion dollars”, which made it one of the most important divorces at the time, Lloyd Klein said in his press release.
Passionate about animals and the African continent, she shared this interest with Alec Wildenstein (died in 2008) whom she met during a lion hunt. The couple had become involved in developing a ranch in Kenya to care for wild animals. During the 20 years she lived together with her ex-husband, she had collaborated with him professionally in the sale of paintings and in the development of private art collections. After her divorce, she continued to organize art exhibitions in New York.
