Educated in her mother's stately homeProvender, Faversham, Kent, England by private tutors, she was told of her family's tragic imperial heritage in pre-revolutionary Russia as a child by her exiled father.[2]
She joined the Romanov Family Association (RFA) in 1980 and, with other members, attended the long-delayed interment of Russia's last emperor and empress in St. Petersburg in 1998.[2] On 3 December 2017, nearly a year after the death of Prince Dimitri Romanovich Romanov on the last day of 2016, she was elected president of the RFA.[4] In the interim, the senior male Romanov descendant by primogeniture, her older half-brother Prince Andrew Andreyevich Romanov (born 1923), was chosen Honorary RFA president. Olga intended to return for the centenary memorial in 2018,[2] at which however, Paul Kulikovsky, a great-grandson of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, and a contingent of other Romanov descendants represented the RFA.[5]
She lives at Provender House in the hamlet of Provender, near Faversham in Kent,[6] where she has restored the 13th century mansion and opened it to tourists.[2][7] Having inherited the ageing mansion and 30-acre (12 ha) estate in 2000, she raised the money to have it refurbished by selling what was left of her father's cache of pre-revolutionary artefacts, most of which had long since been sold to the British royal family.[2]
In 2005, she was on Australian Princess (a reality show) giving advice to competitors.[2] During an interview on Channel 4 television's "Royal House of Windsor", she corrected the prevalent view that the fatal abandonment by the British of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and children to the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution was not due to the callousness of the British government of the day, but to the reluctance of his cousin George V, as was revealed by Kenneth Rose in his biography of the King.[2]
In 2017 she published a memoir, Princess Olga, A Wild and Barefoot Romanov.[8][9]
Nicholas Mathew (b. 6 December 1976);[13] married Judith Aird Stanley (b. 1 October 1976), three children: Thomas (b. 2004) Lucy (b. 2006) Isabella Florence (b. 2011).
Francis-Alexander Mathew (b. 20 September 1979);[14] freelance photographer.[15] 2012 contestant on Ukraine version of The Bachelor.[16] Starred in season 2 of Secret Princes as "Prince Alexander".
^Ghirardani, Jane (22 August 1998). "I might be a Russian princess but I still go to Safeway's, do all the cleaning and muck out the pony; My Diary: By Princess Olga Romanoff, Housewife". Daily Mirror.