L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt dies aged 94

The one-time society beauty, whose wealth, complex family relations and scandal-tinged life often propelled her into society pages and headlines, died in Paris on Wednesday night (local time).

"My mother left peacefully," her daughter Francoise Bettencourt-Meyers said.

For most of her nine decades Ms Bettencourt was better known for who she was than for what she did, even though her first job, at the age of 15, was as an apprentice in a L'Oreal factory, mixing cosmetics and labelling bottles of shampoo.

She was the daughter of L'Oreal founder Eugene Schueller, to whom she was always close.

In 1950, at the age of 28, she married Andre Bettencourt — a government minister of the 1960s and '70s under former president Charles de Gaulle.