Wallis Annenberg, who in more than 20 years in leadership positionsat her family’s Annenberg Foundation oversaw more than $3 billion in grants and donations to projects that include the arts, wildlife and older adults, died on Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 86.
The death was confirmed by the foundation on its website. The cause was complications of lung cancer.
Ms. Annenberg’s father, Walter H. Annenberg, was a politically-connected billionaire, whom President Richard M. Nixon appointed U.S. ambassador to Britain in 1969. He endowed the foundation with proceeds from the $3 billion sale in 1988 of his company, Triangle Publications — which published TV Guide, Daily Racing Form and Seventeen magazine — to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
“I’ve never had a problem using the Annenberg name,” Ms. Annenberg told Vanity Fair in 2009. “That’s who I am, and I’m happy to be that. I’m very proud of it. But I want to be worthy. Because it opens a lot of doors, and I want to be the best person I can to walk through them.”
Although the foundation supports causes around the world, she focused a lot of her giving in the Los Angeles area, where the foundation is located.
Her philanthropy included providing $38.5 million in low-interest loans to help fund construction of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in a former post office in Beverly Hills in 2013. She has given millions more to support the center’s programs.
“Her philanthropic footprint is pretty significant in Southern California,” Zev Yaroslavsky, a former member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, said in an interview. He recalled a meeting in 2007 with her about donating to the county’s Los Angeles Free Clinic (now the Saban Community Clinic).
“She took out a pad, handed it to her assistant and the assistant said, ‘This will be her contribution,’” he said. The figure Ms. Annenberg had written was $3 million, the organization’s largest gift until then, and it went toward starting a separate children’s clinic.
Ms. Annenberg also provided $23 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008, $17 million of it to acquire a valuable collection of 19th and 20th century photographs, and $6 million for its capital campaign. She had previously given $10 million to endow the museum’s directorship.
The foundation fully funded PetSpace, an animal adoption, hospital and humane education center in the Playa Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, in 2017, and provided $3 million to create GenSpace, a sleek, innovative community center for older adults that opened in 2022 and costs members only $10 a month.
“I know living in Los Angeles, a city that fetishizes youth,” Ms. Annenberg told “CBS Sunday Morning,” earlier this year, “I was going to do something that specializes certainly in an older generation.”
The foundation also backed the creation of a 2,500-square foot wooden treehouse in a park in the neighborhood of Torrance that was accessible for people of all physical abilities and ages.
On the foundation’s website, Ms. Annenberg said that the experience of seeing the world from the treehouse “creates a sense of vision, fun and pure escape.”
One of her most visible projects — the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing — is a structure that, when fully completed next year, will span 10 lanes of the busy 101 freeway in Agoura Hills, Calif., to allow the safe movement of mountain lions and other wildlife from the Santa Monica Mountains. She first gave a $1 million challenge grant in 2016 then gave a second, for $25 million, in 2021.
“We wouldn’t have a wildlife crossing without Wallis,” said Beth Pratt, the regional executive director for California of the National Wildlife Federation, which is part of the crossing’s public-private partnership. She added, “She has a big commitment to animals and she had seen that, without the crossing, mountain lions might go extinct in the Santa Monica Mountains and she didn’t want that to happen. She knows that this is a big statement about biodiversity.”
Wallis Huberta Annenberg was born on July 15, 1939, in Philadelphia. After her parents divorced in 1950, Ms. Wallis went to live with her mother, Bernice Veronica (Dunkelman) Annenberg, in Washington. She said that the split was not traumatic for her.
“My mother made everything fun,” she told Vanity Fair. “She married a man from Washington, D.C., who was the largest Chevrolet dealer in the United States at that time, Ben Ourisman.”
Ms. Annenberg graduated from Pine Manor Junior College in 1959. While traveling in Europe, she met her future husband, Seth Weingarten, in Venice. She dropped out of Columbia University to marry him. They divorced in 1975.
After the divorce, her father arranged for her to work at TV Guide. For about a dozen years she was “an arranger and nonwriting story producer” who offered ideas and conducted interviews with major television figures, according to “Legacy: A Biography of Moses and Walter Annenberg,” by Christopher Ogden (1999). She lived in a large home in Beverly Hills purchased by her father.
Ms. Annenberg joined the foundation as a vice president and board member in 2002, when her father died, and succeeded her stepmother, Leonore Annenberg, as the chairwoman, chief executive and president, when she died in 2009.
In 2024, the White House awarded Ms. Annenberg the National Humanities Medal for helping to transform and bolster the arts and humanities in public life.
She is survived by her daughter, Lauren Bon; her sons, Roger, Charles and Gregory Weingarten; and five grandchildren.
When Ms. Annenberg was asked by The Beverly Hills Courier in 2019 what makes a project resonate enough for her to support it, she said:
“I have to give from my heart, first and foremost. Which is why I’ve been focused on issues like women’s empowerment, engaging people in the visual and performing arts, strengthening the human-animal bond. Things that really matter to me.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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