Shams Pahlavi

Elder sister of the last Shah of Iran

Shams Pahlavi (شمس پهلوی; – ) was an Iranian royal of the Pahlavi dynasty, who was the elder sister of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. During her brother's reign she was the president of the Red Lion and Sun Society.

Pahlavi was born in Tehran on 28 October 1917. Shams Pahlavi married Fereydoun Djam, son of then prime minister of Iran Mahmoud Djam, under strict orders from her father in 1937, but the marriage was unhappy, and the couple divorced immediately after the death of Reza Shah. Following the deposition of Reza Shah after the Anglo Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, Shams and her husband accompanied her father during his exile to Port Louis, Mauritius, and later Johannesburg, South Africa. She published her memoir of this trip in monthly installments in the Ettela'at newspaper in 1948. She was deprived of her ranks and titles for a brief period of time after her second marriage to Mehrdad Pahlbod, and lived in the United States from 1945 to 1947. Later, a reconciliation with the court was achieved and the couple returned to Tehran only to leave again during the upheavals of the Abadan Crisis. She converted to Catholicism in the 1940s. Princess Shams was persuaded to convert by Ernest Perron, the best friend of the Shah. Her husband and children adopted Catholicism after her. She dedicated most of her time developing the Red Lion and Sun Society (Iran's Red Cross), making it the country’s largest charitable organization. After returning to Iran following the 1953 coup which re established the rule of her brother, she maintained a low public profile, contrary to that of her sister Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, and confined her activities to the management of the vast fortune she inherited from her father. In the late 1960s, she commissioned the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation architects to build her the Pearl Palace in Mehrshahr near Karaj, and Villa Mehrafarin in Chalous, Mazandaran, which was built during the 1970s. She left Iran for the United States after the Islamic Revolution. She and her family settled in Santa Barbara in 1984. She died of cancer in her Santa Barbara estate in 1996.