Liliane Bettencourt

French heiress, socialite, philanthropist and businesswoman; the richest woman in the world at the time of her death, making her the fourteenth richest person in the world with a net worth of US$44.3 billion, as of the 2017 version of "The World's Billionaires." As of 2016, she was the top female billionaire in the world, and was also the richest person in France. She was one of the principal shareholders of L'Oréal, one of the world's largest cosmetics and beauty companies. Only child of Eugene Schueller, the founder of L'Oreal, her mother died when she was five. She was close to her father and started working in the family company at a young age. In 1950, she married French politician André Bettencourt, who served as a cabinet minister in French governments of the 1960s and 1970s and rose to become deputy chairman of L’Oréal. Bettencourt had been a member of La Cagoule, a violent French fascist group that Liliane's father had funded and supported in the 1930s and that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. After the war, her husband, like other members of La Cagoule, was given refuge at L'Oréal despite his politically inconvenient past. They had one daughter, Françoise, who was born on 10 July 1953. Bettencourt generally shunned media attention and granted few interviews. Since 2007 she faced intense media scrutiny and publicity over her relationship with François-Marie Banier, the estrangement with her daughter Françoise and her alleged funding of conservative French politicians, including former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. She died in Paris in the early hours of 21 September 2017 at the age of 94. Link to Wikipedia biography