Stavros Niarchos
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Stavros Niarchos (3 July 1909 – 16 April 1996) was born in Athens to a wealthy family, as his father had married heiress Eugenia Coumantaros. He studied in the city's best private school before starting university. Once he had received his doctorate in law, he worked for his uncle, a shipowner. His great-great-grand father, Philippo Niarchos, had married a daughter from a noble family whose younger offspring had moved to Greece to base themselves a merchant business from Malta.
He was a naval officer in World War II, during which time part of the trade fleet he had built with his uncle was destroyed. He used about two million dollars in insurance monies to build a new fleet.
In 1952, Stavros Niarchos built the first supertankers capable of transporting large quantities of oil. His naval rival, Aristotle Onassis, did the same in 1952. In 1956 the Suez Canal Crisis considerably increased the demand for the type of large tonnage ships that Niarchos owned. Business flourished and he became a billionaire, just like his rival, Aristotle Onassis.
The shipowners' rivalry continued into their private lives. Niarchos' five marriages produced two daughters and three sons, Spyros, Konstantin Niarchos and Philippe Niarchos. After his divorce from Stavros G Livanos' daughter, Eugenia Livanos, he married Henry Ford II's daughter, Charlotte Ford, which was quickly followed by a divorce, but only after they had conceived a child, Elena Anne Ford. Stavros Niarchos remarried Eugenia Livanos. When she died, he married her sister Athina Livanos, who was also Aristotle's ex-wife.
After the oil crisis of 1973, Stavros Niarchos sold off some of his companies and launched into finances and the diamond trade. In the 1980s, he came more and more often to Geneva, from where he managed his business around the globe. The Golden Greek, as his fellow countrymen liked to call him, retired in the nineties to his main residence in Saint-Moritz, in the Graubunden, where he devoted a lot of time to his favorite sport, skiing.
In 1956 Niarchos acquired the important art collection of actor Edward G. Robinson and over the years put together one of the world's most significant collections with more than one hundred Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. In 1989, he purchased Picasso's self-portrait "Yo Picasso" for $47,850,000, plus he acquired works by Van Gogh, Goya, El Greco, and Rubens. That same year, Niarchos began investing thoroughbred horse racing but got out of the sport until the early 1970s when he put together a highly successful stable of racehorses that competed in France and the United Kingdom. He eventually acquired a breeding farm in Lexington, Kentucky where in 1984 his most successful horse Miesque was bred. After his death in 1996, his daughter Maria Niarchos-Gouazé took charge of the racing operations. She continued to build on his success, and in 2004 her colt Bago (horse) won France's most important race, the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.
Stavros Niarchos died in 1996, in Zurich. He is buried in the family tomb in Lausanne.
