Richard Lugner, the Austrian billionaire and entrepreneur known as the patron of the Vienna Opera Ball who welcomed celebrities including Goldie Hawn, Jane Fonda, Kim Kardashian and Priscilla Presley to the famous event, has died two months after marrying a 42-year-old woman – his sixth wife.
He was 91 years old.
The construction tycoon and businessman had been suffering from recent health problems and had undergone heart surgery, Agence France-Presse reported. He had just married Simone Reiländer on June 1. He died Monday at his home in Vienna.
“Richard Lugner was a successful entrepreneur and a dazzling personality,” wrote Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer on X. “A native Austrian who never lost his way. May he rest in peace!”
Lugner gained international fame starting in the 1990s, when he built Lugner City, the seventh largest shopping mall in the country at the time, according to Euro News.
In 1992, he began paying international celebrities to visit the mall and accompany him to the annual Vienna Opera Ball, a star-studded annual event that is a crown jewel of the Austrian social calendar.
Although Lugner started 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 final prom companion, in February 2024.
He paid his guests “quite a lot of money,” as Fonda said at the time.
Before Lugner City, the entrepreneur built the foundations of his empire on small-scale projects in the 1960s, then was commissioned to build the Islamic Centre of Vienna in 1975, AFP reported.
He also ran twice for president, first garnering nearly 10% of the vote in 1998, but only 2.4% in 2016.
With News Wire Services
