Count Rudi (Rudolf Graf von Schönburg-Glauchau)

Rudolf Graf von Schönburg-Glauchau, known to friends, guests and the wider world simply as Count Rudi, died on 17 October 2026 in Marbella, Spain, aged 94. For nearly seven decades he was one of the people most closely identified with the town's transformation from a quiet fishing settlement into a playground for European royalty, Hollywood stars and the international jet set, and his name was inseparable from the Marbella Club Hotel, the property he helped run and define.

Born into the Saxon nobility, Count Rudi belonged to a family whose comfortable, settled world was destroyed by the Second World War. As a boy he fled westward with his relatives in 1945 as Soviet troops advanced, losing the family estates that had belonged to the Counts of Schönburg-Glauchau. He trained afterwards in hotel management in Lausanne, Switzerland, a career path that would eventually carry him far from the Germany of his birth.

He settled in Marbella in the mid 1950s and became closely tied to the Marbella Club, the hotel founded by Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe-Langenburg that is widely credited with putting the town on the map for wealthy and glamorous visitors. Count Rudi served as the club's general manager through much of the 1960s, 70s and into the early 1980s, and he remained its public face, host and unofficial ambassador long after he formally stepped back, a presence the hotel itself described as part of its very essence.

His personal life was entwined with European royal circles. In 1971 he married Princess Marie Louise of Prussia, a great-granddaughter of Germany's last emperor, Wilhelm II, and the couple raised two children, Sophie and Friedrich, making their home in the hills above Marbella. Through decades of hosting monarchs, film stars and business figures at the Marbella Club, he became a living link to the town's golden age and a reference point for its history.

News of his death was announced by the Marbella Club on social media on 18 October 2026, which called him its first general manager, mentor and friend, and said he had helped create a place where guests became friends and colleagues became family. Tributes followed quickly from across Marbella, including from the city's mayor, Ángeles Muñoz, who described him as leaving an indelible mark on the town that had adopted him. No cause of death has been made public.