SWISS SOCIALITE JOCELYNE Wildenstein, sometimes known as “catwoman” due to her extensive plastic surgery, has died aged 79.
Her partner Lloyd Klein confirmed her passing in a statement yesterday.
“It is with heavy heart and with great sadness that Mr Lloyd Klein announces the unexpected death of his beloved fiance and longtime companion Jocelyne Wildenstein,” the fashion designer said.
The statement added that Wildenstein “died peacefully in her sleep” in the late afternoon of 31 December in her “suite in Paris where the couple had taken temporary residence”.
Klein tried to wake her from a nap so she could get ready for New Year’s Eve dinner, but she was unresponsive, he said.
“Early reports from the doctors called to the scene indicate that she had endured heart failure and passed peacefully in her sleep,” Klein added.
She was last seen in public with her partner Klein on 18 December in Paris.
Born in Switzerland in 1945, Jocelyne Perisset became a New York socialite after marrying art dealer Alec Wildenstein, with whom she had two children.
She kept his name after their messy divorce in the late 1990s.
Some media reports gave her age as five years older.
In a recent interview, she had blamed the confusion on people mixing up her birth year with that of her ex-husband, 1940.
With more than a million followers on Instagram, Wildenstein became known as “catwoman” in the tabloids for the feline-like shape of her eyes.
She had been living between New York and Miami, she told French media in recent months.
Wildenstein last posted a video of herself and Klein posing for photographers outside the Ritz Paris on 23 December, to the soundtrack of Wham’s “Last Christmas”.
“I never wanted to change my face,” she told French television news channel C8 this autumn, though admitting she might have wanted her lips to be a little thicker.
In the 90s, Wildenstein’s appearance became unrecognisable, and her eyes began to develop a feline-like shape.
She had met her husband, Alec Wildenstein, while on safari in Kenya and married him a year later in Las Vegas.
It was after this that Wildenstein is said to have embarked on a cosmetic surgery adventure to look more like a big cat.
According to the Daily Mail, she spent close to €2.5 million on surgeries, apparently in an effort to please her ex-husband, who loved big cats.
She also kept a lynx as a pet, telling Vanity Fair “the lynx has perfect eyes”.
Despite this, she once claimed to have never had surgery and also denied rumours she embarked on cosmetic surgery in an attempt to please her ex-husband.
Indeed, Wildenstein put her feline-like eyes down to genetics, and told Vanity Fair: “If I show you pictures of my grandmother, what you see is these eyes—cat eyes—and high cheekbones.”
She received $2.5 billion from her divorce, and $100 million each year for 13 years, making it one of the most expensive at the time, according to Klein.
Her ex-husband Alec Wildenstein died in 2008.
Asked if she had found love again, she said she had with Klein, who was 21 years her junior.
Klein and Wildenstein “met during New York Fashion Week in 2001 when Lloyd was presenting his fashion collection on the runway,” he said in his written statement.
“She was a front-row guest and after that show the two became romantically involved and had remained inseparable since that time.”
“Jocelyne was my best friend, my partner, my fiance. She had a zest for life, and had a wicked sense of humour,” he added.
-AFP 2024 and with additional reporting from Diarmuid Pepper
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