Princess Shams Pahlavi

HIH Princess Shams Pahlavi or Shahdokht Shams ul-Mulk Pahlavi Persian:شمس پهلوی (born October 18, 1917 in Tehran, Iran - died February 29, 1996 in Santa Barbara, California, USA) was the elder sister of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. During her family's reign, she was the president of the Red Lion and Sun Society.

During a tour of Europe in 1936, she was received together with her mother and sister in Berlin by Adolf Hitler, as the family of the Shah of Iran was considered friendly to Germany. Iran was regarded for many decades as a close ally of Germany, from whom it received much needed technical support for industrialization, transportation and aviation.

She married Fereydoun Jam, son of the then prime minister of Iran, Mahmud Jam, under the strict orders of her father, but the marriage was an unhappy one and the couple divorced immediately after the death of Reza Shah.

Following the deposition of Reza Shah after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, Shams accompanied her father during his exile to Port Louis, Mauritius, and later Johannesburg, South Africa, and published her memoir of this trip in monthly instalments in the Ettela'at newspaper in 1948.

She was deprived of her ranks and titles for a brief period of time after her second marriage to Mehrdad Pahlbod, and lived in the United States from 1945 to 1947. Later, however, a reconciliation with the court was achieved and the couple returned to Tehran, only to leave again during the upheavals of the Abadan Crisis. She converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1940s. Her husband and children adopted Catholicism after her.

After returning to Iran following the 1953 coup which re-established the rule of her brother, she maintained a low public profile, contrary to that of her sister Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, and confined her activities to the management of the vast fortune she had inherited from her father.

In the late 1960s she commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation architects to build her the Morvarid Palace in Mehrshahr near Karaj, and Villa Mehrafarin in Chalous, Mazandaran.

She left Iran for the United States after the Islamic Revolution and died of cancer in her Santa Barbara estate in 1996.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shams_Pahlavi