Dame Vivien Duffield, DBE (born 1946), is an English philanthropist.
Contents |
The daughter of millionaire businessman Sir Charles Clore and his wife, Lady Francine, 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. [1] 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.[2] 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 [3] 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 [4]
Vivien Duffield was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1989 and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. In 2005 she separated from her partner of 32 years, Sir Jocelyn Stevens, who is a former Managing Director of Express Newspapers and former Chairman of English Heritage. In 2006 Dame Vivien Duffield won the Beacon Fellowship Prize.[5]
In November 2008 Dame Vivien Duffield was honoured by HRH The Prince of Wales, being one of the first recipients of the Medal for Arts Philanthropy. The medal celebrates outstanding individual contributions to the arts, and recognises the contributions of the most inspiring philanthropists in the UK.