Australian socialite Primrose Dunlop, whose bridegroom ‘prince’ ran off with the best man on the eve of their lavish wedding, has died. She was 70-years-old.
Dunlop, the daughter of Australian society doyenne Lady Potter and an heiress to a $60 million fortune, entered full-time care with frontotemporal dementia in 2022.
She passed away on Wednesday, 5 February, 2025.
Lady Primrose Potter AC made a $1million donation in her daughter’s name to The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health on Sunday.
‘My daughter, Primrose, has lost her battle with frontotemporal dementia – a heart-wrenching disease,’ Lady Potter said in a statement released by Florey.
The family will hold a private memorial service for this week, and are asking mourners to donate to dementia research in their loved one’s name, rather than send flowers.
Australian socialite Primrose Dunlop has died, aged 70
Primrose Dunlop had a fabulous life among the rich and celebrated, but was never pretentious, even after becoming the subject of global gossip after she was left at the altar
‘Vale Primrose “Pitty Pat” Dunlop. Star of one of Australia’s great society scandals, left at the altar in Venice when the groom eloped with his best man,’ journalist Andrew Hornery penned on Tuesday in tribute.
‘She not only survived but thrived for many years, an exemplar of getting on with it despite the enormous scrutiny surrounding her.’
Lady Potter made her $1million donation to dementia research in the full name of her daughter, ‘Countess Anne Margaret Primrose Krasicki v Siecin.’
‘We are enormously thankful to Lady Primrose Potter for this significant and impactful gift,’ Florey’s executive director Peter van Wijngaarden said in a statement posted on Sunday.
‘With the generous donation in honour of Countess Krasicki v Siecin from the Potter family, a team of Florey researchers will investigate better ways to diagnose FTD and other dementias.
‘We hope that this research will pave the way to improved diagnosis and treatments.’
Primrose’s closest friends have described her life as ‘brilliant and exciting’. They spoke of her high-spirited encounters with the rich and famous, and the ill-fated Venice nuptials that made world headlines.
Primrose was meant to marry diminutive Qantas flight steward Lorenzo Montesini at Venice’s Basilica di San Pietro in April 1990.
Lady Potter and Primrose’s daughter Zofia Krasicki (above) remain close after the death of Zofuia’s father Count Jerzy Krasicki v Siecin and since her mother was confined to care
Montesini claimed to hold the titles of Prince Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar, Knight of St Sophia and Baron Alexandroff.
Primrose herself dismissed the idea the union was her entrée into European ‘royalty’ as ‘a load of rubbish’. But that didn’t stop the gossip.
The wedding never went ahead because Montesini had a partner of two decades, who he’d met as a 19-year-old solider in Vietnam.
Montesini’s partner was a man called Robert Straub, who he’d been with ever since an ‘encounter on a beach at moonlight’ on the South China Sea.
The pre-nuptial parties at the Countess Maria Pia Ferrie’s opulent palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal, one of Europe’s most fashionable addresses, were meant to be the high point of the season for 70 rich and fashionable guests.
Lady Potter and Primrose’s stepfather, multimillionaire stockbroker Sir Ian Potter, had invited American author Barbara Taylor Bradford, and American hostess Evelyn Lambert.
Robert Straub (above) and Montesini had become lovers on a ‘moonlit’ beach during the Vietnam war, but that was all a ‘secret’ until the lavish wedding plans became a notorious social fiasco
Society royalty, Lady Primrose Potter AM (centre, in 2018 with grandaughter Zofia, left) planned a glittering wedding in Venice where daughter Primmie (right) would become a princess
Sir Ian’s daughter Caroly is married to Simon Betterman Parker Bowles, then a brother-in-law to Camilla who later became the Duchess of Cornwall.
Primrose, who had been a social writer, at the time worked for Lord McAlpine, British Conservative Party fundraiser and developer who turned the remote West Australian town of Broome into a famed tourism destination,
Primrose was to become Lorenzo’s princess in a dress inspired by Balenciaga and wearing a diadem of gold oak leaves given to her by Lorenzo.
Three days of lavish celebrations would culminate in the wedding on Easter Monday 1990 at Venice’s Basilica di San Pietro.
After the wedding, the guests would return to the Palazetto Pisani in a regatta of gondolas, disembarking at the water entrance.
Champagne and a candlelit dinner would be served in the marble hall which runs the entire length of the palazzo.
The stage was set and for the Australians already flying in to Venice, it was to be the closest thing to a royal extravaganza they could experience.
The lavish nuptials planned after three days of celebration sin Venice (above) were abandoned when the groom and best man took off for Paris after an argument about money
Primrose, pictured above in classic high spirits with author Janise Beaumont, entered permanent full-time care in 2022, suffering from right frontal lobe dementia
The Potters had even flown in their own society priest, the jet setting Father Vincent Kiss, who unbeknown to anyone at the time had a predilection for stealing church funds and fondling boys.
And then the bridegroom dropped his bombshell and did a runner with his best man to Paris, causing a media frenzy.
But long before it fell into the most deliciously scurrilous feast for the world media – making news across Europe, in the UK, the US and Australia – Primrose’s bizarre wedding plan had been the subject of intense gossip and speculation.
It began with a friendship forged between Montesini and Lady Potter – who he nicknamed ‘The Empress’ in deference to her noble manner and exalted status in Australian society.
Montesini later said he and Lady Potter ‘recognised in each other the quest for excellence in … living’ which ‘replicated that civilised world’.
Montesini and Straub also became drinking buddies with Lady Potter’s daughter, and at one cocktail session, Primrose was bemoaning the expense of getting to parties in London.
Straub suggested Lorenzo marry Pitty Pat. He said this would give her access to cheap Qantas tickets which at the time were not available to same sex partners.
The idea took hold, the news was leaked, the Potters announced the engagement and the couple posed for a formal photograph.
It was shot in the overstuffed living room of the ornately decorated twin rose pink terraces Montesini shared with Straub in the then shabby Sydney wharfside suburb of Woolloomooloo .
Dressed in a tuxedo pinned with his Vietnam medal, Montesini stands behind an elegant Primmie who sits on an elaborately carved chair beneath a chandelier in front of a massive gilt mirror beside a Chinoiserie screen.
The couple are holding hands.
Over the ensuing months, as Lady Potter organised her daughter’s extravagant wedding, tongues wagged at Sydney parties about Montesini’s claim to royal titles and his relationship with Straub.
Now aged in his early 70s, Lorenzo Montesini endured being outcast from Primrose’ circle, the death of his lover Robert Straub from HIV, but has poured himself into the construction of a grand library in his native Alexandria, Egypt
Lorenzo said his grandmother was Princess Anna Grazia Papajionavi Giustiniani, but someone would claim his mother had been illegitimate, rendering him ineligible to be prince.
Burke’s Peerage, the London-based reference for the aristocracy, described the title as ‘a bit dodgy’ and said they had no record ‘of a Montesini’.
Lorenzo said he grew up in a grand house in Egypt, speaking four languages, and that his mother was a grande dame of post-war Egypt, a cross between ‘Ava Gardner and Ingrid Bergman’.
He and Straub had been together since the end of his deployment to Vietnam, but being openly gay back then was impossible.
Of the wedding, Montesini later said, Straub ‘wanted it to happen, and it would shut everyone up that we were not gay’.
Montesini said he tried to call it off, but the plans had taken on their own momentum and when he broached it with Lady Potter she replied, ‘now, now, now Lorenzo’.
‘I was in this bubble. Midsummer madness. I tried to be as sane as I could. But it did get completely out of hand [and] I found myself on a plane heading for Italy,’ he later told ABC.
Before prenuptials could begin, an argument broke out about money.
Countess Pia would later recount coming home to her palazzo to hear crying and argument, remarking that ‘the bridegroom’s companion, an old man who sells clothes in Sydney, was telling the groom to pack his things and get out’.
Montesini later said he walked out after being expected to pay for a meal in Venice.
‘With the rich … they can spend millions on you and yet you can fall out over a taxi fare,’ he told the ABC.
‘I grabbed the opportunity when I was asked to pay for a rather large lunch and I said .. that’s it, not doing it.
‘We had to try and sneak out and it didn’t work. It all blew up
‘We flew into Charles de Gaulle there was a whole media pack. We were followed around in taxis.’
The Italian and British press in particular had a field day, with La Republica published a cartoon of two men throwing a tiara to a bride on a jetty while escaping in a gondola.
The Observer called it a ‘jet set sensation’ and ‘wedding eve fiasco’ and Primrose hired celebrity agent Harry M Miller to handle offers for the rights to her story.
Montesini said back in Sydney he ‘retreated’ into his ‘bubble’, but in truth Sydney society dropped him like a stone.
When Primrose relocated from Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay to Melbourne, she met a real estate agent named George Kirk.
The suave 60-year-old was actually Polish Count Jerzy Krasicki v Siecin and in 1993, 39-year-old Primrose married him in a small family wedding.
She became the Countes Krasicki v Siecin and they had a child, Zofia, a year later.
After a short period of being chased by the media, Montesini retreated into his own world with Straub, who had contracted HIV.
After the death of Primrose’s husband, Count Jerzy Krasicki v Siecin and her own decline from frontal lobe dementia, their Melbourne house in Brighton East (above) was sold and its contents auctioned
There would be no rapprochement between Primrose, the Potters and Montesini.
In 1994, Sir Ian Potter died, leaving a $60m estate.
After 27 years together, Straub died in Lorenzo’s arms in St Vincent’s hospice on August 15, 1995.
Montesini’s groomsman John Lane would die aged 85 in 2008, and Primmie’s employer Lord McAlpine in 2014, aged 78.
