Ivana Trump

Ivana Trump was a Czech-American businesswoman, model, and television personality whose three-decade career produced multiple defining 1980s American business roles — particularly her 1988–1992 chairmanship of the Plaza Hotel in New York City and her 1977–1992 marriage to American businessman Donald Trump. She was born Ivana Marie Zelníčková on February 20, 1949, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia (modern Czech Republic), into a Czech working-class family. Her father Miloš Zelníček was a Zlín-area Czech telephone-engineer, and her mother Marie Zelníčková was a homemaker.

Her education at Charles University in Prague (M.S. in Physical Education, 1972) launched her early-career path. Her 1972 first amateur-skiing-competition career across the Czechoslovakian national skiing team produced her early-career Czech amateur-skiing public profile.

Her 1971 first marriage to Austrian skier Alfred Winklmayr — arranged as a marriage of convenience to obtain a non-Communist-Bloc Austrian passport — preceded her 1973 emigration to Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her 1976 emigration to New York City and her subsequent 1977 first encounter with American businessman Donald Trump — at the Maxwell's Plum restaurant in New York City — launched her late-1970s and 1980s American businesswoman public profile.

Her April 7, 1977 first marriage to Donald Trump produced her subsequent 1977–1992 first marriage and her 1980s American businesswoman public profile. Her 1980 promotion to Vice President of Interior Design for The Trump Organization launched her early-career American real-estate-business public profile. Her 1985–1988 chairmanship of the Trump Castle Casino Resort in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and her subsequent April 1988 chairmanship promotion of the Plaza Hotel in New York City (which Trump had purchased in March 1988 for $407.5 million) produced her late-1980s American business public profile.

Her later biographical narrative was shaped by her late-1989 New York Post-disclosed scandal of Donald Trump's affair with American actress Marla Maples — and her subsequent March 22, 1992 divorce from Trump. The Lachey-Trump divorce produced approximately $25 million in cash and property settlements. She had three children with Donald Trump (Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump). She died on July 14, 2022, at age 73, at her Manhattan, New York City home, of accidental fall-related blunt-force injuries to the torso.

Her name Ivana is the Czech feminine form of Ivan (the Slavic form of John, from the Hebrew Yochanan). Ivana has been climbing in American naming since the 1980s.