J Paul Getty Jr

Sir J. Paul Getty Jr., the reclusive American-born philanthropist and third son of the first American oil billionaire, died in London yesterday at the age of 70. He was born Eugene Paul Getty in September 1932 but later legally changed his name. The bulk of Getty's fortune was his part of the family trust, which became worth about $1 billion after the $10 billion sale of Getty Oil to Texaco in 1984, at the time, the largest acquisition in U.S. history. His brother, Gordon P. Getty, who lives in San Francisco, is on the Forbes World's Richest People list, with a net worth of $2.1 billion. Like his father, who died in 1976 at 83 still commanding the Getty Oil empire, Paul Jr. was fiercely Anglophilic. He lived in Britain the last 30 years of his life and was knighted in 1986 for giving away more than $200 million to many U.K. charities, including the National Gallery in London, the British Film Institute and to the families of striking coal miners. He gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1998. Paul III overdosed on drugs and alcohol, becoming a paraplegic and almost blind. Tara Gabriel Galaxy Gramophone Getty, Paul III's son, is an actor. A daughter, Aileen, became infected with AIDS. Getty's two other children are Mark, cofounder and executive chairman of Getty Images (nyse: GYI - news - people ), and Ariadne. He married Victoria Holdsworth in 1994. Because of his addiction to drugs in the 1970s, Paul's health was poor. He had severe circulatory problems in his legs, impaired lung function due to pneumonia and irreversible cirrhosis of the liver. Getty himself spent a great deal of time in the 1980s in London Clinic, a hospital, watching cricket games and old movies, particularly those directed by John Ford.