Last Onassis Heiress Takes Over Empire

For 18 years the Greeks have waited for Athina Roussel, the sole surviving member of the fabled House of Onassis, to talk to them.

Now as the lanky, auburn-haired teenager enjoys her last weeks as an unencumbered minor before coming of age on 29 January, picking up a fabulous fortune along with the chalice of fame as a birthday present, the expectation has become frenzied.

The teenager will step immediately into the limelight from a media-sheltered childhood in Switzerland, with her biography written and a TV drama series about her life ready to roll.

So far, the highly protected heiress has said approximately three words in public, 'hello', 'thank you' and 'good-bye', although in private she has allegedly expressed dark thoughts about wanting to give her empire away.

She has caused ripples of disquiet over her love affair with a 29-year-old married Brazilian whose estranged wife has called her a 'gold-digger'. Here is an eerie parallel with her tragic mother, Christina, whose life of serial lovers, drugs and drink ended with a mysterious bathtub death at the age of 37.

Athina is an icon in Greece - the nearest thing to Princess Diana - and, even though her first language is Swedish and her spoken Greek is poor, the Greeks reclaim her as their own.

She is inheriting the fortune created by her rag-to-riches grandfather, Aristotle, estimated at £2.7 billion.

Money, critics said, could never buy happiness - even when it is held in 217 banks and invested in artworks, factories, firms and properties in three continents - and especially in a clan beset by tragedy since Aristotle was caught by his wife having sex with Maria Callas. Christina smothered Athina with gifts: her dolls wore Dior, and she received a zoo complete with keeper and a flock of sheep because her favourite tune was 'Baa, Baa, Black Sheep'.

Almost from the day Christina died, when Athina was three, her daughter's wealth has been the focus of legal battles between her French father, Thierry Roussel, and the four Greek greybeards entrusted to co-administer her estate.

Now Athina has been accused of wrecking a marriage to enjoy the affections of her first love, the Brazilian show jumper 'Doda' Alfonso de Miranda Neta. 'He is attracted to her money,' Sibel Dorsa, the horseman's freshly divorced wife, snarled last week. Even if Athina wanted to, she will find it hard not to live up to the name she has refused to adopt - she insists on being called Roussel.

As she approaches her 18th birthday, she is being propelled, willy-nilly, into the world of celebrity: later this month she will grace the front cover of a US magazine while a four-part televised mini-series about her life and times is under way.

But so far the last of the Onassises shows every sign of being a sphinx without a riddle; a girl who prefers horses to high life.

Opinion polls show Greeks believe she will play 'the most influential role' in public life in the next decade. Hopes are high that she will accept the invitation to represent Greece in the national squad at the 2004 Olympics.

Kidnapping fears mean that she is shadowed by former SAS bodyguards, and goes to school in an armoured-plated car.

'She is very determined and competitive, as we have seen with her show jumping, but also rather introspective and low-key,' said Alexis Matheakis, who has written the inside account of the heiress, Athina in the Eye of the Storm. 'Neither her brother nor her sisters [born to her loving Swedish stepmother, Gaby Landhage] would want to be her, because they've seen the hounding.'

Roussel's insistence that Athina be allowed 'a normal life and a carefree childhood' appears to have paid off.

In a household that is 'very Swedish and green-minded', education has been kept to Swiss state schools that are near the family's modest Californian-style villa outside Lausanne.

'Gaby comes from a fairly humble background and Athina, like her other children, have been instilled with ordinary little day-to-day values that are not always found in wealthy kids in Greece,' Matheakis told The Observer. 'At some point she will speak, when she feels she has something to say.'