Irina was born in
Paris because her parents had been exiled for marrying without the permission of
Tsar Nicholas II. Her parents' marriage was considered
morganatic, meaning that her father had not married a woman of equal rank, and their children took their mother's rank rather than their father's. Irina's mother was later granted the title of
Princess Paley by Tsar Nicholas II. The family was allowed to return to Russia during
World War I. Her older half-sister
Maria was supposed to be her godmother, but their uncle Grand Duke Sergei, who had been appointed as Maria's guardian, forbade it. As a child, Irina resembled her father, being thin, pensive and impressionable. Her childhood was described by her older half-sister in her memoirs:''"The girls revered their brother and greatly admired him.
Volodia took advantage of this to make them carry out all his desires. In rehearsing them in the plays he wrote he worked them mercilessly for hours on end. Highly flattered by his attention his sisters endured patiently all his rudeness, his scoldings, even his slaps. He often made them cry, yet they always took up a new play with the same enthusiasm and did not in the least appreciate it when I or some other grown-up tried to protect them from Volodia's arbitrary tyranny."''Following the
Russian Revolution of 1917, Grand Duke Paul, who was too ill to register with the rest of the Romanov family, was under close observation by the new government. Irina later recalled how her father walked with her and her younger sister in the garden and talked about what his marriage had meant to him:
"He spoke to us at length about all that he owed to our mother, all that she had brought to him which he had never known in his life before, and about all that she had been to him. He spoke while he walked, and this allowed him to overcome his reserve and his intense shyness. Did he sense then that he had not long to live? I am tempted to believe it and to think that he was asking us to take care of our mother when he could no longer be with her." Both Irina's father and her brother,
Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, were killed by the
Bolsheviks. Irina, her mother, and her sister
Natalia later escaped to France in 1920. ==Marriages==