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Pixie Skase, the widow of controversial businessman Christopher Skase, has died 83 in Melbourne.
She died on November 15, her daughter Amanda Larkins said on Tuesday night.
Ms Skase was one of Melbourne’s best known and most glamorous socialites in the 1980s.
She was known for extravagant parties, her big blonde hair, her shoulder pads and her love of the finer things in life such as flashy diamonds.
‘Our beloved beautiful mother Pixie passed away peacefully on Friday afternoon, the 15th of November,’ Ms Larkins posted.
‘We have had no words to express our loss, and still don’t. She was greatly loved and leaves a hole in our hearts. Rest in Peace Mum.’
Ms Skase was once one of Australia’s richest women, jetting around on private planes and building $35million mansions with her husband.
But her dramatic fall from grace left her renting a modest two-bedroom Melbourne apartment from a friend for $560-a-week and rifling through supermarket bargain bins.
Pixie Skase, the widow of controversial businessman Christopher Skase, has died 83 in Melbourne. The couple is pictured
The socialite lived exiled in Spain for 17 years after the collapse of her husband’s $1.5billion company Qintex in 1991, leaving Mr Skase with personal debts of $172million.
After her husband died from stomach cancer in 2001, Ms Skase returned to Australia and kept a low profile.
She was born Pixie Dixon in Melbourne in 1941, then changed her first name to Joanne in the 1960s, her second husband George Frew wrote in his book Someday I’ll Have Money.
But the attempted name change didn’t stick and she was always known as Pixie.
Ms Skase grew up in Balwyn North, 13km east of Melbourne’s CBD, and attended high school at Methodist Ladies College in Kew.
She had three daughters – Amanda, Felicity and Kate – with her first husband, Albert Argenti, who was well known as the ‘singing waiter’ in the 1950s and 1960s.
Ms Skase (pictured) died on November 15, her daughter Amanda Larkins said on Tuesday night
Her next husband was Mr Frew, who founded the Commodore hotel chain. They got hitched in 1970 and had a daughter, Alexandra.
But that marriage only lasted until 1975 and she started dating journalist turned businessman Mr Skase in 1976, after meeting him in a South Yarra art gallery.
They married in 1979.
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