Valéria Hidvéghy or Valerie Pascal Delacorte (14 June 1914 – 14 July 2011) was a Hungarian actress.

Life

Delacorte was born in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

and broke through the iron curtain to marry the film producer

Gabriel Pascal Gabriel Pascal (born Gábor Lehel; 4 June 1894 – 6 July 1954) was a Hungarian film producer and director whose best-known films were made in the United Kingdom. Pascal was the first film producer to successfully bring the plays of Georg ...

. She is best known today for her 1970 memoir of him, ''The Disciple and His Devil: Gabriel Pascal and Bernard Shaw''. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1995 she wrote that the character of Eliza in the guise of a Magyar princess in "

My Fair Lady ''My Fair Lady'' is a musical based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play ''Pygmalion'', with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The story concerns Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons f ...

" was due to her first husband. After Pascal's death she married

George T. Delacorte, Jr. George T. Delacorte Jr. (20 June 1894 – 4 May 1991) was an American magazine publisher, born in New York City. He founded the Dell Publishing in 1921. His goal was to entertain readers who were not satisfied with the genteel publications ...

in 1959 and together with him became a philanthropist as well as safeguarding Pascal's correspondence and legacy. She outlived this second husband as well and in 1991 three years after his death, made her first donation of $1 million and five Old Master paintings to the

Norton Museum of Art The Norton Museum of Art is an art museum located in West Palm Beach, Florida. Its collection includes over 8,200 works, with a concentration in European, American, and Chinese art as well as in contemporary art and photography. In 2003, it overt ...

.''Norton Museum of Art remembers late benefactor Valerie Pascal Delacorte's 'extraordinary joy of life'', 17 July 2011, Palm Beach Post via museum website In total she donated 60 paintings to the museum. Delacorte died at her home in

Palm Beach Gardens Palm Beach Gardens is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida, Palm Beach County in the U.S. state of Florida, 77 miles north of downtown Miami. , the population was 59,182. Palm Beach Gardens is a principal city of the Miami metropolitan area, whic ...

References

External links

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The Disciple and His Devil: Gabriel Pascal and Bernard Shaw
on google books 1914 births 2011 deaths Actresses from Budapest American memoirists Hungarian film actresses American art collectors Women art collectors American women memoirists Hungarian emigrants to the United States 21st-century American women {{Hungary-bio-stub