Olga Deterding

Common card · No. 313276

Olga Maria Deterding (23 August 1926 – 31 December 1978) was a wealthy heiress and socialite who regularly featured in the gossip columns of London society during the 1960s and 1970s. She inherited an estimated £50,000,000 from her father Sir Henri Deterding, the second chief executive of Royal Dutch Petroleum, following his death in 1939 (equivalent to £2.83 billion in 2025). Her mother was Deterding's second wife, the White Russian Lydia Pavlovna Koudoyaroff (1904–80), a former mistress of his rival Calouste Gulbenkian. Olga Deterding grew up at Buckhurst Park at Winkfield in Berkshire and was later educated at Oxford University. In 1956, she became an unpaid volunteer at Albert Schweitzer's leper colony in Lambarene, West Africa. Without any medical training, she worked in the kitchen and at other tasks but refused to see even visitors she knew. Deterding remained with Schweitzer for a year until she became ill with a tropical disease. After this, she lived in Tahiti for six months....

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