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As Ann Russell Miller she had partied hard and lived life to the full, but she left her family of 10 children to become a cloistered nun
Sister Mary Joseph of the Trinity, who has died aged 92, was a nun of the cloistered Order of Discalced Carmelites, or was for the last 30 years of her life; before renouncing the world, however, she had been Ann Russell Miller, one of the “Rockefellers of the West Coast”, as a friend put it, a hard-partying, high-diving, fast-driving socialite with a shoe collection that made Imelda Marcos’s seem “pitiful in comparison”.
She also had 10 children.
In her heyday, she was friends with Nancy Reagan and Loretta Young, the film star, and sat on the board of 22 charitable organisations. She had her hair done four times a week by Elizabeth Arden, covered her parasols with Hermès scarves and had her spectacles coordinated with her outfits.
She smoked, drank, played cards and spent five hours a day on the telephone, though she did once give up the instrument for Lent.
Forty guests regularly sat down to dinner at the nine-bedroom house overlooking San Francisco Bay where she and her husband Richard made their lives. But in 1984, he died of cancer.
At...