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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/movies/dina-merrill-dead-actress-and-heiress.html An elegant presence in most of her 30 or so mid-20th-century movies, Ms. Merrill played the betrayed wife who loses both her husband, Laurence Harvey, and her mink coat to Elizabeth Taylor in “Butterfield 8” (1960); the chic fashion consultant who loses Glenn Ford to Shirley Jones in “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” (1963); and the steadfast socialite wife of an assistant district attorney played by Burt Lancaster in “The Young Savages” (1961). In the submarine comedy “Operation Petticoat” (1959), her stranded Navy nurse ends up married to a slick lieutenant played by Tony Curtis. The daughter of the Wall Street broker E. F. Hutton and the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, Ms. Merrill grew up in luxury, spending up to six months a year on the Sea Cloud, the family yacht. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were among the guests on what has been described as a “floating palace” equipped with fireplaces, marble bathrooms, a barber shop and a wine cellar. Home during the winter was the 115-room Mar-a-Lago estate, which was bought by Donald J. Trump in 1985 and converted into a private club. (Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump slept in the same children’s suite that Ms. Merrill had used.) Married to the actor Cliff Robertson in 1966, she was partly responsible for bringing down the head of a Hollywood studio. When David Begelman, the president of Columbia Pictures, embezzled $10,000 by forging Mr. Robertson’s name to a check, no one paid much attention, Ms. Merrill said, until she called her friend Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post. “Cliff took the telephone and told the whole story,” she recalled. “Kay put an investigative reporter on it, and then it really became public.” With an inheritance from her parents estimated at more than $50 million, Ms. Merrill became a philanthropist. A liberal Republican, she was vice chairwoman of the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition, an advocate on women’s health issues and vice president of the New York Mission Society. After her son David, who had diabetes, died in a boating accident at age 23 in 1973, Ms. Merrill created a yearly award for scientific excellence in his name for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.