Audrey Emery

Who was Audrey Emery?

Anna Audrey Emery was an American heiress and socialite who was the wife of one of the last Russian Grand Dukes.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, she was the youngest daughter of John Josiah Emery, a real-estate millionaire, and his wife, the former Lela Alexander. She had two sisters, Alexandra and Lela, and two brothers, Thomas Emery and John Josiah Emery, Jr..

She married, morganatically, in 1926, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, an exile after the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich of Russia, Dmitri's cousin, elevated Audrey to Russian rank of knyaginya with the usual name Romanovsky and granted her the suffix, Ilyinsky, from Dmitri's former property in Russia. In 1928, she gave birth to her only child, Prince Paul Romanoff-Ilyinsky. In 1937 she divorced Dmitri and moved to France with her son, marrying that same year a member of a princely house of Georgia, Prince Dimitri Djordjadze; that marriage also ended in divorce. After the end of both marriages, she resumed her maiden name and was known legally and socially as Mrs. Audrey Emery.