Marina Sturdza, Romanian Princess and Humanitarian, Dies at 73 (Life story)
Marina Sturdza, Romanian Princess and Humanitarian, Dies at 73
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Marina Sturdza at an event sponsored by the charity Hope and Homes for Children in Bucharest, Romania, in March 2014. She was a leading patron of the group.Credit...Alex Paun/Hope and Homes for Children, via Associated Press
By Sam Roberts
- Oct. 24, 2017
Marina Sturdza, who fled Romania as a 3-year-old princess and returned after its repressive Communist government was routed to become one of her country’s leading humanitarians, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 73.
The cause was cancer, her stepdaughter, Lynn Harvey, said.
A would-be diplomat and a former journalist, Ms. Sturdza ended her self-imposed exile in Canada and the United States in the mid-1990s, several years after the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was deposed. She then became fully engaged in promoting foreign investment in Romania and supporting child protection and palliative care programs there.
She was a patron of Hope and Homes for Children, Hospices of Hope Casa Sperantei, FARA Romania and other causes. She also served on the board of Pro Patrimonio, a foundation devoted to preserving historic architecture, including Romania’s wooden churches.
She received the European Union’s Women of Achievement Humanitarian Award in 2005.
Her parents belonged to Romania’s historic reigning families, but her early years were far from a royal fairy tale.
Marina Nicole Sturdza was born on April 25, 1944, in Brasov, in the Transylvania region, to Romanian aristocrats, Ion Sturdza and the former Ioana Soutzo.
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They divorced when Marina was an infant. Her mother’s second marriage, to a Romanian industrialist, Dumitru Bragadiru, also ended in divorce. Her mother later married Richard Sankey Malone, who died in 1985.
Romania endured tumultuous political shifts in the 1930s and ’40s. A fascist government allied with Nazi Germany was toppled in a coup in August 1944 by King Michael. He was forced to abdicate in 1947 after Soviet-occupied Romania held elections, which solidified control by the Communists, who began purging aristocrats and other dissenters.
Following the Communist takeover, Ms. Sturdza’s parents fled Romania in 1948 under assumed names. Marina remained briefly with her grandmother, who helped her flee separately by placing her on a train; the girl had been sedated so that she would not betray her nationality by speaking Romanian. She was belatedly met near the border by a diplomat and finally reunited with her parents in Zurich.
The family lived in Switzerland, France and Italy until they immigrated to Canada under an agricultural program. Her stepfather was put to work on a pig farm near Alberta, and Marina was assigned to a one-room schoolhouse. After about eight months, the family moved to Toronto.
In 1970 Ms. Sturdza married Denis Harvey, a journalist who went on to become editor in chief of The Toronto Star. Their marriage ended in divorce.
Ms. Sturdza became a journalist herself, covering fashion and culture as a columnist for The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. She later worked briefly for the designer Oscar de la Renta in New York before being hired as a marketing manager in Geneva for a United Nations Children’s Fund greeting card program.
She returned to Romania for the first time in the early 1990s with Ioana Ertegun, an interior designer who is known as Mica and who was the wife of Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records. Ms. Ertegun was supporting the World Monuments Fund’s restoration of the Brancusi Monument to World War I soldiers in Targu Jiu, in southwestern Romania.
In 1997, Ms. Sturdza helped organize a business summit convened by The International Herald Tribune that was described as the first such economic development initiative in Romania.
At her death, she was president of Marina Sturdza Enterprises and Summits International, corporate strategic planning consultancies that specialize in Eastern Europe.
In addition to her stepdaughter, a television producer in the United States and Canada, her survivors include two step-grandchildren.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 27, 2017, Section B, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Marina Sturdza, 73, Romanian Princess and Humanitarian. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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