After a career as an educational administrator, Mary Anne Schwalbe immersed herself in the cause of refugees, playing a pivotal role in the International Rescue Committee.

Her first love, however, had been the theatre, and she had worked with, and for, such grandees of New York theatreland as Irene Mayer Selznick and Frederick Brisson and directed American auditions for the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

Subsequently, as a senior educational administrator, she worked first at Radcliffe College and then as dean and director of admissions and financial aid (scholarships) at Harvard University, Massachusetts. Moving to New York, she worked at two private day schools.

Mary Anne Schwalbe was born into a privileged background in 1934 in New York, to Emily Goetz and James Goldsmith Jr. Her engagement with refugees started almost accidentally when Sister Mater, a nun working in the tribal refugee camps of northern Thailand, asked for help. Financial support followed, but when Sister Mater asked for teachers, Schwalbe took a sabbatical to work there for six months, seeing first-hand the plight of the dispossessed.

She came back with a mission, determined to offer practical support beyond the financial. This led not only to her involvement for 20 years with the International Rescue Committee (the world’s oldest and biggest NGO for refugees, started by, among others, Albert Einstein in the 1930s), but also to the founding of the IRC-affiliated Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children.

Her British connections inspired her to persuade the IRC to initiate, in 1997, the IRC UK, which now raises nearly £30 million annually to fund programmes worldwide. Her final cause over the past two years had been raising funds for travelling libraries for Afghanistan and a library in Kabul. She used her extensive network in education, the arts and among the well-off. Hers was an art of persuasion, delicately and effectively employed.

She was the first woman president of the Harvard Faculty Club, served on 22 boards of schools and colleges, and helped to provide scholarships for refugees. She kept an active connection with London, in theatre, music and collecting contemporary British art. The Schwalbes’ homes in New York and London were centres of hospitality.

This dynamo of energy was contained in a small, quiet, smiling elegantly dressed woman, who could appear as conventional as a lady who lunches, but who travelled the world, often in desperately trying circumstances; her journeys included being an electoral observer in the Balkans, as well as being shot at in Afghanistan.

She was sustained by a strong faith and was an elder of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, but she never proselytised or imposed. Her implacable goodness was leavened by a sharp realism, and a subtle wit. She had an ineffable charm, and a lightness of touch.

She is survived by her husband, Douglas, whom she was married to in 1959, and two sons and a daughter.

Mary Anne Schwalbe, refugee worker, was born on March 31, 1934. She died on September 14, 2009, aged 75