Leila Pahlavi

Biography

Leila Pahlavi (Persian: لیلا پهلوی; 27 March 1970 – 10 June 2001) was a princess of Iran. She was the youngest daughter of Mohammad Reza Shah the last Shah of Iran, and his third wife, Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi. She was nine years old when she and her family were forced into exile as a result of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. She studied literature and philosophy at Brown University. She committed suicide at 31 years of age.

== Early life ==

Leila Pahlavi was born on 27 March 1970 in Tehran, Iran. She was the fourth and youngest child of Mohammad Reza Shah, the last Shah of Iran, and Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi. She had two elder brothers, an elder sister, and an elder half-sister, and lived in the Niavaran Palace in northern Tehran. She later recalled in an interview: "Even when I was only three years old, he would take me by the hand when he went to meet with foreign dignitaries."

== In exile ==

Princess Leila was nine years old when she and her family were forced into exile as a result of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Under political pressure, she and her family moved from Egypt (where she studied at the K-12 Cairo American College) to Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the United States, and Panama. Her father died in Cairo, Egypt from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1980 when she was ten years old. Thereafter, the family lived in the Koubbeh Palace in Egypt for two years, and then settled in the United States.

She attended the Pine Cobble School in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Marymount School of New York (1979-80) and the United Nations International School in Manhattan in New York City, and later graduated from Rye Country Day School in Rye, New York, in 1988. She spoke Persian, English, and French fluently, as well as some Spanish and Italian. She spent much of her time commuting between her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Paris, where her mother lived.

Leila Pahlavi studied literature and philosophy at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and was said to have graduated in 1992. However, some sources say she dropped out of university before graduation, due to declining health. She was a one-time model for the designer Valentino. While living in London, she often went to the nightclub Tramp. She suffered from anorexia nervosa, bulimia, chronic very low self-esteem, severe depression, and chronic fatigue syndrome. A year before she died, she said in an interview: "I remain as Iranian as if I'd never left home."

== Death ==