Audrey Emery
| Audrey Emery | |
|---|---|
| Princess Romanovskaya-Ilyinskaya | |
| Spouse | Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia Prince Dimitri Djordjadze |
| Issue | Prince Paul Dmitriievich Romanovsky-Ilyinsky |
| House | House of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov |
| Father | John Josiah Emery |
| Mother | Lela Alexander |
Anna Audrey Emery (4 January 1904 - 25 November 1971) was an American heiress and socialite who was the wife of one of the last Russian Grand Dukes.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, she was the youngest daughter of John Josiah Emery, a real-estate millionaire, and his wife, the former Lela Alexander (later the Hon. Mrs. Alfred Anson). She had two sisters, Alexandra (Mrs. Benjamin Moore and Mrs. Robert Gordon McKay) and Lela (Mrs. Alastair Mackintosh and Duchess of Talleyrand), and two brothers, Thomas Emery and John Josiah Emery, Jr. (who married Irene Gibson Post, the daughter of the artist Charles Dana Gibson).
She married, morganatically, in 1926, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, an exile after the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich of Russia, Dmitri's cousin, elevated Audrey to Russian knyaz (princely) rank (rank of nobility, not dynastical) with the usual name Romanovsky and granted her an additional princely name, Ilyinsky, from Dmitri's former property in Russia. Some society circles and/or celebrity publications apparently took this as a ducal title (which is a possible translation, but not the conventional one) and sometimes Audrey has been referred to as a Duchess. Anyway, as grantee of the (exile) substantive title, she started the princely house of Ilyinsky in the exiled Russian nobility. Due to the lack of ebenbuertigkeit restrictions on otherwise valid marriages, she is regarded as having become a duchess of Schleswig and Holstein-Gottorp through her marriage to a bridegroom who as a younger male member of that house was entitled also to the said titles.
In 1928, she gave birth to her only child, Prince Paul Romanoff-Ilyinsky. In 1937 she divorced Dmitri and moved to France with her son, marrying that same year a member of a princely house of Georgia, Prince Dimitri Djordjadze; that marriage also ended in divorce. After the end of both marriages, she resumed her maiden name and was known legally and socially as Mrs. Audrey Emery.
In the 1940s she lived in South Carolina, later moving to Biarritz, France. Over the years, she owned several houses in Palm Beach, Florida. In the 1960s she built a house in Cincinnati, Ohio, to which she moved in order to be closer to her son and his family. She died in Palm Beach, Florida.
In 1992, her son, Paul Ilyinsky, who had become an American citizen, served in the U.S. Marine Corps, and was a three-time Mayor of Palm Beach, Florida, technically succeeded as head of the ducal and princely House of Holstein-Gottorp.
- Skott, Staffan (1997). Kõik need Bernadotid. ISBN 9985-65-142-1