Reza Pahlavi

Iranian royalty, the first son of Farah Diba and the Shah of Iran and heir to the throne of the peacock kingdom. The young prince escaped with his father and family from Iranian Muslim Fundamentalists in 1979. In exile from his country, Reza assumed the throne of his late father in 1981. He travels around the globe visiting with fellow Iranian ex-patriots and dreams of returning to Iran as the new Shah. Reza was brought up in a life of wealth, privilege and royalty. Raised by a French governess, he attended the private school in the palace restricted to the royal family and imperial court associates. He was trained with discipline for his future role as absolute monarch, the Shah. He had a distant relationship with his parents who spent ten minutes with him daily. His father allowed the young boy his company when the Shah read his newspapers or exercised. A male companion, a former military man was appointed to Prince Reza when he was a baby and has been his companion to this day. Limited in his interactions with ordinary Iranians, he escaped the summer palace once as a boy to wander in the bazaar with strangers. In 1967, his parents had their coronation. At 13, Reza became a qualified pilot. He attended Williams College in the U.S. and trained at the U.S. Air Force base in Lubbock, TX in 1978. In 1989, he downplayed reports of his vast wealth as he traveled to Los Angeles to greet the largest community of Iranian exiles in the United States. He denied reports of a brutal regime in Iran by his father and avoids conversations about the orgy of conspicuous consumption lavished on the 2,500 anniversary of the Peacock Throne in 1971, costing $100 million. Reza believes in leading the Iranian people in a democratic monarchy advocating civil liberties in Iran without his fathers infamous SAVAK, secret police. On 12 January 1986, Reza married 17-year-old Yasmine, the daughter of a wealthy Iranian businessman from California. He met her when she was a student in Washington, DC where he maintains an office. She studied political science at American University. They live in a guarded, home with bodyguards in Virginia. He plays tennis and cooks Oriental, Middle Eastern and European cuisine for his wife as a hobby. Their daughter Nour was born on 3 April 1992 in Washington, DC. A fan of American TV and the Dallas cowboys, Reza meets with Iranian expatriates to discuss plans of a popular uprising against Khomeini. In mid-2002, widespread political protest in Iran was hitting its strike and Prince Reza was appealing to Iranian leaders to support a nonviolent insurrection, campaigning from his American headquarters for the return of constitutional monarchy. Link to Wikipedia biography Read less