Ivana Trump Dies at 73

Born Ivana Zelníčková in 1949 in the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Trump’s talents as a skier saw her join the junior national ski team, opening her up to a world beyond the boundaries of Soviet communist rule. She eventually married a platonic friend, Alfred Winklmayr, to obtain Austrian citizenship, and after they divorced in California a year later, she moved to Canada to continue her career as a ski instructor, later picking up jobs as a model.

In 1976, Trump traveled to New York City, where she first encountered Donald Trump, then on the rise in the New York business world after becoming president of his father’s real estate company and renaming it The Trump Organization. A year later, they were married, and their famously tight-knit relationship extended into their working lives too, with a 2018 Netflix documentary describing her as a “charismatic workaholic, a career woman, [and] an equal.” Together, they had three children: Donald Jr. in 1977, Ivanka in 1981, and Eric in 1984.

Throughout the 1980s, thanks to their high-profile real estate ventures and active social lives in Manhattan high society, the Trumps became tabloid fixtures—not least so in 1989, when it emerged that the pair were set to divorce following Trump’s affair with Marla Maples, who would later become his second wife. The divorce was finalized in 1992 after a lengthy legal battle, with a settlement that included $14 million, a Connecticut mansion, and an apartment in Trump Plaza. (The high-profile divorce even earned Trump a memorable cameo in the divorce-themed 1996 film The First Wives Club, in which she tells a group of recent divorcées: “Don’t get mad, get everything!”)