Princess Olga Andreevna Romanoff | |||||
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Born |
London, United Kingdom |
8 April 1950 ||||
Spouse | Thomas Mathew (m. 1975; separated 1989) |
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Issue | Nicholas Mathew Francis Mathew Alexandra Mathew Thomas Mathew |
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House | Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov | ||||
Father | Prince Andrei Alexandrovich of Russia | ||||
Mother | Nadine Sylvia Ada McDougall |
Full name | |
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Olga Andreevna Romanova |
Princess Olga Andreevna Romanoff (born 8 April 1950) is a Russian princess and descendant of the House of Romanov.
Princess Olga is the youngest child of Prince Andrei Alexandrovich of Russia and the only one born of his second marriage in 1942, to Nadine Sylvia Ada McDougall (1908–2000). Her father was the son of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich of Russia, who belonged to a cadet branch of the Romanovs, and his wife Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, Tsar Nicholas II's sister. Olga Andreevna uses the English version of her family name, preferring 'Romanoff' to 'Romanova', the feminine form of her name in Russian. Prior to marriage she was known by the title and name, "Princess Olga Andreevna Romanoff", but does not use a title currently.
Educated in her mother's stately home in England by private tutors, she was told of her family's tragic imperial heritage in pre-revolutionary Russia as a child by her exiled father. She joined the Romanov Family Association in 1980 and currently serves as a committee member, joining its members in attending the long-delayed interment of Russia's last emperor and empress in St. Petersburg in 1998 with the intention of returning for the centenary memorial in 2018. Her book of reminiscences and anecdotes, "Princess Olga: A Wild and Barefoot Romanov" is to be published by Shepheard-Walwyn in October 2018.
She resides at Provender House in the hamlet of Provender, near Faversham in Kent, where she has restored the 13th century mansion and opened it to tourists. Having inherited the ageing mansion and 30-acre (12 ha) estate in 2000, she raised the money to have it refurbished by selling what was left of her father's cache of pre-revolutionary artefacts, most of which had long since been sold to the British royal family.
In 2005, she was on Australian Princess (a reality show) giving advice to competitors. During an interview on Channel 4 television's "Royal House of Windsor", she revealed that, contrary to the prevalent assumption, the fatal abandonment by the British of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and children to the Bolsheviks during the Russian revolution was not due to the callousness of the British government of the day, but to the reluctance of his diffident cousin King George V.