Nora Gregor

Who was Nora Gregor?

Nora Gregor (3 February 1901 – 20 January 1949) was a stage and film actress.

She was born Eleonora Hermina Gregor in Gorizia, a town which then belonged to Austria-Hungary but is now part of Italy, to Austrian Jewish parents.

Her first husband was Mitja Nikisch, a pianist. They divorced circa 1934.

In the mid 1930s Gregor became the mistress of the married vice chancellor of Austria, fascist politician Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg, with whom she had a son, Heinrich (1934-1997). On 2 December 1937, five days after the prince's marriage to his first wife, the former Countess Marie-Elisabeth von Salm-Reifferscheidt-Raitz, was annulled, he and Gregor wed in Vienna.

In 1938, the Starhembergs emigrated to France through Switzerland, and her husband joined the Free French forces; cut off from their money and eighty family estates, they were supported for a period by Starhemberg's close friend Friedrich Mandl, the Austrian armaments magnate. In 1942, the Starhembergs moved to Argentina.

Reportedly depressed since the beginning of her South American exile, Gregor committed suicide in Viña del Mar, Chile.