Ivana Trump: Glamorous immigrant who became a US institution (2024)

Ivana Trump, who died on Thursday at the age of 73, was a competitive skier, glamorous model and hard-driving businesswoman who became one half of New York City's ultimate power couple in the 1980s through her marriage to an up-and-comer she knew simply as "The Donald".

Married four times, once to the future US president from 1977 to 1992, she was the devoted mother of his first three children: Ivanka, Donald Jr and Eric Trump.

Seen as equal in ambition to Donald Trump, she held several positions within the family's Trump Organization and built a fashion brand after their messy divorce.

And though the duo had reconciled in the decades since, Ms Trump struck out on her own with a voice as distinct as her accent and a flamboyant personality to match.

Born Ivana Marie Zelnickova in 1949 in what was then communist Czechoslovakia, she grew up in the small city of Zlin.

Her father was an electrical engineer and her mother a telephone operator.

She began skiing at age four and would later join the junior national ski team.

With its extensive travel opportunities, being on the team gave the young Ivana her first real taste of the capitalist riches beyond Zlin.

Her mother, Marie Zelnickova, would later recall that her girl "didn't want to stay" there.

After attending college in Prague, she wed Austrian ski instructor Alfred Winklmayr in what she would later term a "Cold War marriage".

Mr Winklmayr was a friend - and their arrangement secured her an Austrian passport and a move to Canada without formally "defecting" from her homeland. She said the two never consummated the union, which was dissolved in 1973.

Settling in Montreal, she worked as a ski instructor, took English courses at McGill University by night, and became a model promoting the 1976 Winter Olympics.

While on the job with other models at a reception in New York City that year, she met the 29-year-old Donald Trump, who was in the beginnings of his Manhattan real estate career.

Describing him in a later memoir as "smart and funny - an all-American good guy", she married him the following year.

Donald and Ivana Trump - with her striking blonde bouffant - quickly became a fixture in New York City's glittering social scene.

Mr Trump had begun shifting the focus of the real estate empire he inherited from his father to high-profile projects in Manhattan.

And Ms Trump closely involved herself in many of her husband's business projects, including Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt in New York City and the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City.

It was she who picked out the pink marble that lines the floors and walls of Trump Tower, and - overruling the building's architects - had a 60ft waterfall installed in its atrium.

A former Trump Organization executive, Barbara Res, said Ms Trump had "a tremendous work ethic", but did it all "to impress Donald, to win his approval".

Through the opulent 1980s, the Trumps were an "it couple", spotted at Broadway openings, photographed on red carpets and adorning the gossip columns.

Ms Trump was also credited with coining his nickname "The Donald".

When the decade came to an end, however, so did their marriage.

Tabloid stories turned from tales of their gilded success to allegations of Mr Trump's infidelity and reports of stormy arguments between the couple.

During their acrimonious 1990 divorce proceedings, Ms Trump accused her husband of rape and physical abuse - although she would later recant those claims.

She was granted a divorce on the grounds of "cruel and inhuman treatment" by Mr Trump and won custody of their children.

They finalised their split in 1992, with Ms Trump receiving $14m, a large Connecticut estate, a New York City apartment and one month a year at the family's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Mr Trump would subsequently marry Marla Maples, the actress and model with whom he had been having the affair.

He has often said the marriage unravelled because of the difficulty of working with one's spouse.

After their divorce, Ivana Trump continued to invest in real estate, both in the US and Europe.

With a very American talent for self-reinvention, she also launched a designer fashion line and a cosmetics company, Ivana Haute Couture, wrote several books and became an icon in her own right as a glamorous divorcee and eminently quotable interviewee.

Jennifer Saunders, the creator of the classic BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, has said Ms Trump and her taste for the high life inspired the character of Patsy Stone. The character describes Ms Trump as "tremendous" in an episode.

Making a cameo in the 1996 hit film The First Wives Club, Ms Trump delivered the now-famous line: "Ladies, you have to be strong and independent, and remember, don't get mad, get everything."

It is unclear when she reconciled with Mr Trump but by 2008 he hosted her fourth marriage, to Italian actor Rossano Rubicondi, at Mar-a-Lago, with 400 guests and their daughter Ivanka serving as maid of honour.

In a 2017 memoir, she said they spoke on a weekly basis.

But as her ex-husband's focus turned from real estate to politics, Ms Trump kept her distance.

She told ABC's Good Morning America that she had a direct line to the White House, but did not want to "cause any kind of jealousy" in Mr Trump's current wife Melania.

"Because I'm basically first Trump wife. I'm first lady, OK?" she said with a laugh.

A spokesperson for Melania Trump hit back, calling it "attention-seeking and self-serving noise".

When Mr Trump's re-election campaign came to an unceremonious end in 2020, his ex-wife was quick to say she was glad.

"I just want this whole thing to be over with, one way or the other," she told People Magazine, adding that she wanted her children to "live their normal lives".

She added that she didn't think Mr Trump was a "good loser".

Related Topics