Life and Career
The daughter of millionaire businessman Sir Charles Clore and his wife, Lady Francine (Halphen), Vivien Louise Duffield was educated at the Lycée Français, Heathfield School and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University where she read languages. She was for some years married, until their divorce, to British financier John Duffield, a Knightsbridge-based, London financier who is credited with building two fund management groups, Jupiter Fund Management and New Star Asset Management. She has a brother, Alan Evelyn Clore.
After her father's death in 1979, Vivien Duffield assumed the Chairmanship of Clore's charitable institution, the Clore Foundation. She created her own foundation in 1989, and the two foundations merged in 2000 to become the Clore Duffield Foundation, which is particularly noted for support of the arts and of British Jewish charities. In 2006 the Foundation had an annual expenditure of £6,382,837. Substantial bequests and donations on Duffield's own account and on that of the Foundations she controls have resulted in her gaining a place on the boards of a number of British institutions including the South Bank Centre and the Royal Opera House.
At the ROH she chaired a £100 million rebuilding campaign. She also has a place on the board of the Jewish Community Centre for London, a project that she initiated following a visit to the Jewish Community Centres of North America in 2002. Duffield chairs the newly-launched Campaign for the University of Oxford, which aims to raise in excess of £1.25 billion to support education at Oxford University.
A 2005 London Evening Standard article estimated that she and the Foundations she controls had donated in excess of £176 million. The same article quoted friends who described her as "a frightful bully, a very awkward customer", while she refers to herself as "bossy, arrogant and practically unemployable". In March 2011, amid heavy Government cuts on the arts, she donated £8.2 million for educational purposes to 11 leading arts institutions
Read more about this topic: Vivien Duffield
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:
“A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Kittering’s brain. What we will he think when he resumes life in that body? Will he thank us for giving him a new lease on life? Or will he object to finding his ego living in that human junk heap?”
—W. Scott Darling. Erle C. Kenton. Dr. Frankenstein (Sir Cedric Hardwicke)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)