Ivana Zelníčková

Ivana Marie Trump is a Czech-American businesswoman, media personality, fashion designer, author, and former model. She lived in Canada in the 1970s before relocating to the United States where she married Donald Trump in 1977. She has three children with Donald Trump Jr: Ivana Marie Trump, better known as Ivanka, and Eric Trump Jr. She wrote an advice column for Globe called Ask Ivana from 1995 through 2010.

About Ivana Zelníčková in brief

Summary Ivana ZelníčkováIvana Marie Trump is a Czech-American businesswoman, media personality, fashion designer, author, and former model. She lived in Canada in the 1970s before relocating to the United States where she married Donald Trump in 1977. She held key managerial positions in The Trump Organization as vice president of interior design, as CEO and president of Trump’s Castle casino resort, and as manager of the Plaza Hotel. Ivana’s divorce from Trump, finalized in 1992, was the subject of extensive media coverage in the 1990s. Following the divorce, she developed her own lines of clothing, fashion jewelry, and beauty products which were sold on QVC London and the Home Shopping Network. She wrote an advice column for Globe called Ask Ivana from 1995 through 2010 and has published several books including works of fiction, self-help, and an autobiography. She has three children with Donald Trump Jr: Ivana Marie Trump, better known as Ivanka, and Eric Trump Jr. Donald learned to speak fluent Czech while Ivanka gained only a basic understanding of her native tongue since the time of her mother’s birth. She took on major executive roles in the Trump Organization, working as a senior executive for seven years during her marriage to Trump.

She also worked to earn an interior designer’s license after moving to New York and led the interior design team for the Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City. She is married to real estate magnate Robert Trump and has a daughter with him, Ivanka Marie Trump. Her son Donald Trump, Jr. was born on February 20, 1949, in the Moravian city of Zlín, Czechoslovakia, the daughter of Miloš Zelníček and Marie Zelnýčková. Her Czech father was an electrical engineer and her Austrian mother worked as a telephone operator. Her father encouraged her skiing talent, a practice she began at age four. After developing skills as a skier, she joined the junior national ski team, which offered her opportunities to travel beyond the Soviet-era communist boundaries of what was then the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. In 1971 she married Alfred Winklmayr, a ski instructor and her platonic friend, in order to obtain an Austrian passport. The marriage to an Austrian granted her the freedom to leave Communist Czechoslov Slovakia without defection so she could retain the right to return to visit her parents.