Though he was the son of probably the richest man in the world, John Paul Getty II found peace of mind only with the greatest difficulty.

After a dissolute young life, in which drugs put an end to his first marriage and killed his second wife, he became a recluse, battered by further family tragedies and finding fulfilment only in a few pastimes such as watching cricket and collecting books.

Finally a late third marriage, to a woman nearly 20 years his junior, brought him happiness and allowed him to escape from some of his old demons.

Britain has cause to be grateful to Getty for his philanthrophy. With a personal fortune estimated at £1.6 billion, he gave £140 million to institutions such as the National Gallery, the British Museum and the Imperial War Museum. He gave £50 million to the National Gallery for an acquisitions fund, £20 million to the British Film Institute, £1 million to Hereford Cathedral to enable it to keep the Mappa Mundi, and bought the land around Ely Cathedral to prevent the view of the "Ship of the Fens" from being obscured by building.

He also gave smaller sums to less conspicuous causes, ranging from a memorial to the Dambusters Squadron to preservation of the Elfin Oak.

He caused a stir, and considerable surprise, in June 2001, after Tony Blair's second election victory, when he gave £5 million to the Conservative Party, which he deemed "the party best equipped to defend the British way of life". Although he was known to be a friend of fellow cricket-lover John Major, he had not previously made his politics public. In the same month he held a spectacular party, which was described as a kind of pre-emptive wake.

The Getty fortunes began with his grandfather, George Franklin Getty, a Christian Scientist who entered the oil business. Thereafter, each generation of Gettys seemed destined to be disappointed by its children (though the family presently seems more united than for many decades).

George Franklin's son J. Paul I, born in 1892, was a playboy during the First World War and the 1920s (he was a friend of Charlie Chaplin), and he married three teenage girls in quick succession. His father disapproved of his behaviour, and accordingly left him only about 5 per cent of his fortune. After this disappointment, Paul I set out to prove in business that he was not the waster that he seemed.

In the following 50 years he became the world's richest man by consolidating much of the American oil industry under his control, thanks to deals with the Arabs, as the importance of oil in the economy grew year by year.

Unfortunately he became obsessed with money - "If you can actually count your money, then you are not really a rich man," he once said - and its pursuit warped his relations with his four wives and five children. He installed a payphone at his home, and when his children came to visit he was said to have charged them for lunch. He once suggested to friends that they should wait outside a dog show for 15 minutes so as to get half-price admission.

But beneath the comic meanness lurked dark forces. The family was rivalled only by the Kennedys and the House of Atreus for unhappiness.

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