Prince Rainier of Monaco, 81, Dies

Prince Rainier attends a national day of celebration in Monaco with his children, Prince Albert, Princess Caroline, second from left, and Princess Stephanie on November 19, 2000. (Reuters File Photo)

The young prince was educated in England, at the Summerfield College in Saint Leonards on Sea and at Stowe School at Buckingham. He also studied at the Chateau de Rosey College at Rolle, Switzerland, and received a bachelor's degree at the School of Political Sciences in Paris.

In 1944, he enlisted as a foreign volunteer in the French Army. He served with the 2nd Army, participated in operations for the Alsace campaign and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre with bronze star.

After the war, he was assigned to the French Military Mission in Berlin, becoming a captain in 1949 and a colonel in 1954. He also was the commandant of the Monagasque carabinieri, Monaco's standing army.

Rainier assumed the throne in 1949, five years after his mother, Princess Charlotte, took up with a notorious jewel thief known as Rene the Walking Stick and renounced her claim. His father was Prince Pierre Grimaldi of the House of Polignac, whom Charlotte married in 1920 and divorced in 1930.

Prince Louis II, Rainier's grandfather, bestowed the right of rule on young Rainier in 1949 after being extremely ill for several months. Louis died a few weeks later.

The prince was considered the most eligible bachelor in Europe when he assumed the throne just before his 27th birthday. Tabloids and gossip columns linked him with French actress Gisele Pascal, popularly labeled "the uncrowned princess of Monaco." But his spiritual adviser and chaplain, Father Richard Tucker of Wilmington, Del., known as "Father Tuck," broke up the twosome and ruled out the possibility of marriage.

"Only away from the principality can His Highness be more a good fellow than a prince," Tucker told The Washington Post in 1956. "At Monaco he is and must be more a prince than a good fellow. He never participates in anything in any way lacking in dignity among his own people. To swim and dance, he leaves the principality."

In a spate of pre-marriage profiles, Rainier was described as "blue-eyed, dark-haired, of medium height and athletic, speaks English with only the trace of a continental accent and smiles charmingly." He was a "remarkably sea-conscious man" who liked sailing and living aboard his 150-foot yacht. He also enjoyed making undersea movies and collecting rare animals for his private menagerie. He owned nine dogs and told reporters he intended to tame his captive lions personally.

Rainier's pocketbook-sized principality had been a high-class gambling mecca since the opening of the plush Monte Carlo Casino in 1856, but at mid-20th century, Monaco itself was nearly crapped out. The casino, and by extension Monaco, had become a bit passe, a jaded, slightly faded corner of the Riviera famously described by the English novelist Somerset Maugham as "a sunny place for shady people." Newer, more fashionable haunts were luring fickle jet setters.

Rainier's storybook marriage not only helped revive the ancient principality, but his efforts over the years to diversify Monaco's economy bore fruit as well. Encouraging trade and tourism and enhancing its role as a tax-free haven for foreign capital, Monaco under Rainer's rule prospered spectacularly.

In 1962, the mini-state got caught up in a "mouse that roared" tiff with France over whether to tax French citizens and corporations residing in Monaco. In a radio address to his subjects, the prince proclaimed that Monaco represented no danger to France and "asks only to live in peace and prosperity."

Whatever the significance of the dispute, the disparities between the participants evoked international amusement. One reporter predicted, tongue-in-cheek, that the "boys in the trenches" would be home by Christmas.

In 1967, Rainier won a three-year battle with Aristotle Onassis over the direction of Monaco's tourist development. The prince wanted to attract a wider class of tourists, while the Greek shipping king tried to keep Monte Carlo as a millionaire's playground. Monaco's Supreme Court rejected Onassis's claim that the government was manipulating stock in an effort to wrest control of a development company away from the Greek ship owner. Onassis sailed away.

By the early 1970s, the gambling tables were still an integral part of the Monte Carlo scene, but they were contributing only 3 percent of Monaco's national income. The Monaco that Rainier remade is today a magnet for money and for a number of wealthy celebrities, whose eyes light up at the sight of Monaco's minimal income taxes. It is also headquarters for numerous pharmaceutical and cosmetics manufacturers.

Although popular with his subjects, Prince Rainier himself did not fare as well as his fiefdom in the years following his wife's death. Although his subjects long have considered him something of a pater familias, he has been beset by numerous health problems over the years. He also had to cope with the tawdry, very public scandals of the Princesses Caroline and Stephanie.

Their brother, now Prince Albert II, has often been described as a playboy, but he has managed to avoid the occasionally lurid escapades of his sisters. Grimaldi observers found little in his makeup, however, that suggested an aptitude for the varied duties of the throne, particularly the vigorous CEO duties his father carved out for himself. He is Monaco's de facto ruler until a formal investiture, which is expected after a mourning period.

As he assumes the throne, he remains unmarried, although Monaco changed its rules of succession in 2002 to assure a Grimaldi successor. If he does not produce an heir, he can name a child of one of his sisters as his successor.