Marie-Laure de Noailles

Marie-Laure de Noailles, Vicomtesse de Noailles (French pronunciation: ​[maʁi lɔːʁ də noaj vikɔ̃tɛs də noaj]) (31 October 1902 – 29 January 1970) was a French artist, regarded one of the 20th century's most daring and influential patrons of the arts, noted for her associations with Salvador Dalí, Balthus, Jean Cocteau, Ned Rorem, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, Francis Poulenc, Wolfgang Paalen, Jean Hugo, Jean-Michel Frank and others as well as her tempestuous life and eccentric personality. She and her husband financed Ray's film Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929), Poulenc's Aubade (1929), Buñuel and Dalí's film L'Âge d'Or (1930), and Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930).

She was born Marie-Laure Henriette Anne Bischoffsheim, on 31 October 1902, the only child of Marie-Thérèse de Chevigné, a French aristocrat, and Maurice Bischoffsheim, a Paris banker of German Jewish and American Quaker descent. One of her 3x-great-grandfathers was the Marquis de Sade, and her maternal grandmother, , Countess de Chevigné, inspired at least one character in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Her nephew, Philippe Lannes de Montebello, was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Her stepfather was the French playwright Francis de Croisset, and her former sister-in-law, Jacqueline de Croisset, became the third wife of actor Yul Brynner.

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