Richard Lugner, the Austrian billionaire and entrepreneur known as the don of the Vienna Opera Ball who squired A-listers like Goldie Hawn, Jane Fonda, Kim Kardashian and Priscilla Presley to the famed event, has died two months after marrying a 42-year-old bride — his sixth wife.
He was 91.
The construction magnate and socialite had been suffering from recent health problems and underwent heart surgery, Agence France-Presse reported. He had just married Simone Reiländer on June 1. He died Monday at his Vienna mansion.
“Richard Lugner was a successful entrepreneur and a dazzling personality,” Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer wrote on X. “An Austrian original who never lost his way. May he rest in peace!”
Lugner gained international fame starting in the 1990s, when he constructed Lugner City, the seventh-largest shopping center in the country at the time, according to Euro News.
In 1992, he began paying international A-listers to visit the mall and then accompany him to the annual Vienna Opera Ball, a star-studded annual affair that’s a crown jewel in Austria’s social calendar.
Though Lugner launched the tradition with Harry Belafonte, his subsequent guests included Joan Collins, Pamela Anderson, Kim Kardashian and a host of other female luminaries, including Sophia Loren. Fonda accompanied him in 2023, and Presley was his most recent, and last, ballroom companion, in February 2024.
He paid the guests “quite a bit of money,” as Fonda said at the time.
Before Lugner City, the entrepreneur built his empire’s foundation on small-scale projects during the 1960s, then was commissioned to build the Vienna Islamic Centre in 1975, AFP reported.
He also ran for president twice, first garnering nearly 10% of the vote in 1998, but just 2.4% in 2016.
With News Wire Services
