Child Holocaust survivor Severin Wunderman built up a multi-million dollar business in luxury watches and became a major art collector and philanthropist.
In the 1970s he set up watch production for Gucci, which he ran and controlled for over 25 years until Gucci Timepieces was bought back by the family in 1998.
In 2000 - when his "no compete" contract clause expired - he bought the small Swiss-based Corum watch company, relaunching it as a limited edition brand featuring designs linked to poker championships and yacht races.
The youngest of three children of a glovemaker, Severin was placed by his parents into the care of a priest, who put him in a home for blind children. The family survived, though Severin's mother died in the late 1940s.
From the home, where he was the only sighted child, he was taken in by a Catholic family, who did not want to return him to his parents.
His father had to remove him by force, tying up the rest of the family. At 16 Severin joined his sister, Bella, in Los Angeles. His brother, Max, also moved to California.
By day he managed a string of newspaper delivery boys, at night he worked in a car park. He moved on to work with a manufacturing jeweller, making and selling gold chains.
This led him into the watch business and he became a salesman for Paris-based watchmaker, Alexis Barthelay. On a sales trip, he phoned the New York office of Gucci, the Italian luxury leather goods and accessories firm, and was answered by Aldo Gucci himself, company chairman during its massive expansion in the US.
He persuaded Aldo Gucci to place a huge manufacturing order, then took over himself when he realised Barthelay's reluctance to produce so many watches itself.
With financing from Aldo, he established Severin Montres in Irvine, California, as sole manufacturer and distributor, balancing accessible pricing with upmarket appeal to achieve $550 million worth of sales in his final year of ownership.
From the age of 19 he was fascinated by the French artist and writer Jean Cocteau and started collecting his works. With his new base in Irvine, he now had space to display the pictures, drawings, tapestries and objets d'art he continued to amass.
The collection was opened as the Severin Wunderman Museum in 1985 and donated to the University of Texas in Austin in 1995. A further collection was donated in the South of France, where he had a home.
Diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in the 1990s, he promised the specialist, who was reluctant to treat him, $5 million a year in research funding for every year he survived.
This resulted in the Severin Wunderman Family Foundation for research into incurable illnesses. He eventually died from a stroke.
He was a board member of Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation and received the Légion d'Honneur in 2005.
Married five times, he is survived by two sons, three daughters and four grandchildren.