Who

Patty Hearst is a socialite, occasional actress, convicted felon, and the mother of social butterflies Lydia Hearst and Gillian Hearst Simonds.

Backstory

The granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the publishing tycoon who inspired Citizen Kane, Patty Hearst was raised in the wealthy San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough in one of America's richest and most privileged families. But the family sustained an embarrassing barrage of press in 1974 when a 19-year-old Patty was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by a guerrilla group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA demanded $400 million in ransom for Patty's safe return, but as negotiations over her release dragged on, she announced in taped transmissions that she'd converted to the SLA's nonsensical lefty cause and renamed herself Tania; in one of the most memorable photographs of the era, Hearst even wielded an assault rifle as the group robbed a bank in San Francisco. Patty was arrested in 1975 and claimed at trial that she'd been suffering from Stockholm syndrome. The jury didn't buy her defense and Hearst was convicted and sentenced to prison. She was released in 1979 after President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. (She was officially pardoned by Bill Clinton on January 20, 2001, his final day in office.) Since then, Hearst has dabbled in writing and acting. Film director John Waters, who has long had a fascination with the bizarre 1974 incident, has cast Hearst in a slew of films over the years, including Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, Pecker, Cecil B. DeMented, and A Dirty Shame. She also made an appearance on TV teen drama Veronica Mars, playing (what else?) a kidnapped heiress.

Family ties

Patty has four sisters—Catherine, Virginia, Victoria, and Anne, who married 80s phenom author Jay McInerney in 2007. Her niece is model/socialite Amanda Hearst. Veronica Hearst was her father's third wife.

Personal

After her release from prison, Hearst married her former bodyguard, Bernard Shaw. Their two daughters, Gillian and Lydia, are both fixtures on the social scene. The Shaws live in Wilton, Conn. where Patty keeps a collection of prize-winning French bulldogs.