Lee Radziwill Husband History: Michael Canfield, Prince Radziwiłł, and Herbert Ross

If you’re searching for Lee Radziwill’s husband, the clean answer is that she was married three times. Lee Radziwill (born Caroline Lee Bouvier) moved through three very different marriages across three distinct eras of her life: Michael Temple Canfield, Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł, and filmmaker Herbert Ross. Each relationship sits inside a wider story—one where Lee wasn’t just “Jackie’s sister,” but a style force, a social figure, and a woman constantly trying to define herself in a world that loved to define her first.

Who Was Lee Radziwill?

Lee Radziwill was an American socialite and style icon, best known publicly as the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But “sister” doesn’t really capture her cultural role. Lee had her own gravitational pull—fashion, interiors, travel, art circles, and a way of making elegance look effortless. She flirted with careers in acting and public relations, cultivated friendships across the cultural elite, and spent decades moving between New York, Europe, and a rarefied social world that most people only see through magazine pages.

Her marriages matter because they intersect with the key identity shifts of her life: youthful adulthood and ambition, aristocratic reinvention, and later-life partnership after she’d long been established as a society figure in her own right.

Lee Radziwill’s Husbands at a Glance

1) Michael Temple Canfield (married 1953; divorced 1958; later annulment)
2) Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł (married 1959; divorced 1974)
3) Herbert Ross (married 1988; divorced 2001)

If you’re looking for a simple timeline, that’s it. But if you want to understand why each marriage matters in the larger story of Lee Radziwill, you have to look at what each relationship represented in the moment.

First Husband: Michael Temple Canfield

Lee Radziwill’s first husband was Michael Temple Canfield, a publishing executive. They married in April 1953 and divorced in 1958. Later, the marriage was declared annulled by the Sacred Rota in November 1962.

This first marriage belongs to Lee’s earliest adult chapter. It took place before she became the “Princess” figure the public would later associate with her name. It also happened before the full Kennedy-era spotlight reached its maximum intensity. At that stage, Lee was still becoming herself—still working out what kind of life she wanted, what kind of world she wanted to belong to, and how much of her identity would be built around public perception.

Because Lee’s later life became so famous, her first marriage can feel like a prologue that gets rushed through in biographies. But it matters because it shows she wasn’t born “Princess Lee.” That title came later. Before the glamour, there was a young woman testing adult life, making choices, and discovering that stability and status don’t always deliver the emotional security people assume they will.

Second Husband: Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł

Lee Radziwill’s most famous marriage—because it changed her title and public identity—was to Prince Stanisław Albrecht “Stas” Radziwiłł. They married on March 19, 1959, and divorced in 1974.

For many people, this is the marriage that defines the “Lee Radziwill” image. She became widely referred to as Princess Lee Radziwill, and the title carried weight in American society culture. In a mid-century world obsessed with lineage, elegance, and European nobility, the Radziwiłł name added a new layer to her public story: not just a Bouvier, not just a Kennedy-adjacent figure, but a woman with aristocratic status and a distinctly international social position.

This marriage also unfolded during a period when the boundary between public life and private life was thinner than it looked. Lee’s sister Jackie married John F. Kennedy in 1953 and became First Lady in 1961, which meant Lee’s life—her travel, her social presence, her style—was often viewed through a “proximity to power” lens whether she wanted it or not. Being married to a European prince amplified that fascination. People weren’t just looking at Lee as a person; they were looking at her as a symbol of glamour.

Lee Radziwill’s Children

Lee had two children with Prince Stanisław Radziwiłł: Anthony Radziwiłł (1959–1999) and Anna Christina “Tina” Radziwiłł (born 1960).

Motherhood added another dimension to her identity. In a society world that can be intensely performative, children are often treated as part of a “legacy narrative.” But for Lee, children also represented a private center in a life that was frequently public and scrutinized. Even when she moved through high-profile circles, her family life remained a part of her story that shaped how she navigated later years.

Third Husband: Herbert Ross

Lee Radziwill’s third husband was Herbert Ross, an American film director and choreographer. They married on September 23, 1988, and their divorce was finalized in 2001.

This marriage belongs to a later-life chapter—after her divorce from Prince Radziwiłł and after Lee had long been established as a recognizable society figure in her own right. Herbert Ross came from the world of film and creative production, which is a different kind of status than aristocracy. If the second marriage placed her inside a European title and social tradition, the third marriage connected her to a professional creative industry—one where taste, influence, and reputation circulate differently than they do in royal-adjacent circles.

It’s also a reminder that Lee’s life wasn’t frozen in one era. People often mentally lock her into the Kennedy/Camelot decades, but she lived through multiple cultural shifts and continued to move through new environments, new friendships, and new personal chapters. Marrying Ross signaled that her story wasn’t only about “what she was born into” or “who she was related to.” It was also about choices she made as an adult, later in life, on her own terms.