The disturbing marital story behind the face of the “cat woman”, who died at 79

What did Jocelyne Wildenstein look like before her incredible physical transformation? The main interested party gave an overview herself on her Instagram account last August. In this rare vintage photo, taken in the early 1980s, the latter is… ironically, unrecognizable. She appears alongside her daughter Diane, displaying a face a thousand miles from her famous feline look obtained through cosmetic surgery. Because, before her facial transformation which earned her her famous nickname “cat woman”, Jocelyne was a young Swiss woman from Lausanne, from a bourgeois family, with fine and delicate features corresponding to the beauty standards of the time. . Her life changed at age 31 when she met Alec Wildenstein, a wealthy French art dealer who became her future husband and father of her two children. He also becomes, according to legend, the one who is at the origin of his radical change in appearance.

Passion for “exotic cats”

It was during a safari in Kenya in 1977 that she met and fell in love with the millionaire. They share a passion for Africa, which Jocelyne has already spent a decade exploring. The couple married immediately, moved into a New York penthouse together and started a family. But it is at their extravagant ranch in Kenya’s Ol Jogi Nature Reserve that she thrives most, overseeing the 200 buildings, two swimming pools, 55 artificial lakes, 366 servants and two tigers who live in an armored glass cave.

Legend has it that they had been married for a year when Jocelyne, fearing to lose her husband’s interest, resorted to surgery in order to please him again. It was her partner’s love for “exotic cats” that gave her the idea of ​​obtaining a “more feline” appearance, thus hoping to become “more attractive” in his eyes, explained an article in the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2008. Anecdote which earned him the nickname “Catwoman» in the Anglo-Saxon world.

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The incredible physical transformation of Jocelyne Wildenstein, aka the “cat woman”, died at 79

The socialite, who lived between New York and Miami at the time, began by targeting her eyes, seeking to obtain “lynx eyes”, which she considered “perfect”. The first in a long list of operations, which cost more than 2 million euros in total, but which unfortunately had the opposite effect to that expected. Always according to The Telegraphthe first time Alec Wildenstein saw his wife after his transformation, he was said to have “screamed in horror”, unable to recognize her. “She was crazy. She thought she could fix her face like a piece of furniture. Skin doesn’t work that way. But she didn’t want to hear anything,” said Alec Wildenstein in an interview with the American magazine Vanity Fair in 1998.

Unsatisfied, she will then undergo a series of additional cosmetic procedures in order to “improve” her physical appearance again. Among these, collagen injections in the lips, cheeks and chin, as well as at least seven facelifts and radical reconstruction of the eyes, specifies the article in the Telegraph. By the end, her skin was so tight she could barely blink.

“When you look in the mirror, it’s for yourself.”

If she claimed in the past that she had given herself a facelift because her husband “hated being with old people”, Jocelyne Wildenstein, however, ended up changing her tune. “He never pushed me… No, he always told me that I looked very young,” she said in the same interview with Vanity Fair. And added: “Until the day you no longer look young enough!” The one who owned a lynx as a pet claimed, moreover, that its feline appearance was in fact naturally present in her genes. “If I show you pictures of my grandmother,” she said, “what you see are these eyes – cat eyes – and high cheekbones.”

More recently, on the set of the show “Chez Jordan de luxe” on C8, she assumed her metamorphosis with disconcerting serenity and reclaimed her trajectory. “When you look in the mirror, it’s for yourself, right?” she explained, putting into perspective the number of interventions she had had. Asked by the host about the veracity of her former companion’s influence on her intention to resemble a cat, she brushed aside his insinuation with the back of her hand. “No. I think my eyes have always looked a bit feline. I was born like that,” she said, believing that this look “could please”…

A $2.5 billion divorce

In 1998, his highly publicized $2.5 billion divorce maintained the myth and fascination against him. In an interview given to Sunday Times in June 2023, she claimed that her ex-husband had tried to blame her for the breakdown of their marriage, declaring that “he no longer recognized his wife because of her numerous plastic surgeries”. Interventions which, paradoxically, made her recognizable among thousands.

For some time now, the jet-setter had returned to the spotlight, thrilling the crowds with her flashy lifestyle on the arm of her companion Lloyd Klein (twenty years her senior), which she flaunted on her Instagram account followed by more 1 million subscribers. During Paris Fashion Week, drag queen Alexis Stone, close to Jocelyne, even created a splash by taking her features at the Balenciaga fall-winter 2023 haute couture show, establishing her as an icon of fashion. pop culture.

His disappearance, on Tuesday December 31 in a Parisian hotel, at the age of 79, sparked renewed interest in his story and raised questions that are more relevant than ever, particularly on the abuses of cosmetic surgery and ethics of professionals. She takes with her the mystery and secrets that will have surrounded her existence.