JOSEPHINE Clay Ford, a philanthropist and the only granddaughter of car pioneer Henry Ford, has died. She was 81.
She had been ill for several weeks. "Throughout her life, she embodied the spirit of giving and family loyalty, " Ford Motor Co chairman Bill Ford Jr, a nephew, said.
"She was an inspiration. Her love for Ford Motor Company was unsurpassed."
Ford owned more than 13 million shares of Ford Motor stock - about 18-per cent of the stock held exclusively by Ford family members. In 2001, Time magazine estimated her fortune at dollars-416m (pounds-340m).
The Detroit Institute of Arts, the Josephine Ford Cancer Center and the College for Creative Studies, an art and design college in Detroit, were among recipients of millions from "Dody" Ford and the foundation she established.
"What else is there for a girl who wasn't competitive to do but try to escape all that Ford stuff?" she once said.
Graham W J Beal, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, said Ford was "extraordinarily generous". The museum received from Ford artwork and monetary donations that Beal said amounted to "a serious eight-figure sum", including Vincent Van Gogh's Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin, which Bill Ford's e-mail said was valued at dollars-40m (pounds-32.7m).
She was born in 1923, the third of Edsel and Eleanor Ford's four children. Edsel was Henry Ford's only son.
Coincidentally, in 1943 she married a man named Ford - Walter Buhl Ford II, who began his career with rival General Motors Corp. He died in 1991.
The couple had two sons and two daughters.
Their younger son, Alfred Brush Ford, was active in Ford corporate charities but otherwise shunned the family business and joined the Hare Krishna religious sect, renaming himself Ambarish Das.
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