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CORRECTS first name in paras two and five to Jocelyne
Swiss socialite Jocelyne Wildenstein, also known as “catwoman” due to her extensive plastic surgery, has died aged 79, her partner said on Wednesday.
“Her partner Lloyd Klein is pained to announce the death of Jocelyne Wildenstein in Paris aged 79” on Tuesday, he told AFP in a statement.
“An icon has left us.”
She died of a pulmonary embolism in a luxury hotel in Paris, he said.
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.
The cosmetic surgery aficionado, with more than a million followers on Instagram, 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.
She last posted a video of herself and Klein posing for photographers outside the Ritz Paris on December 23, 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.
She said she did not embark on cosmetic surgery to try to keep her ex-husband.
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