Her father was an Australian bookie and adventurer. Her mother was a princess, a scion of the Konbaung dynasty, the last royal family of Burma (now Myanmar). They met while betting on the racetracks in Rangoon (now Yangon), the capital, and it was she who proposed.

“Mr. Bellamy,” she said. “I think you are in need of a wife.”

Their daughter, June Rose Bellamy, was no less bold, and as she grew up in colonial Burma, in an insular British outpost of manicured lawns, her mother wanted her to see the world.

The opportunity seemed to come when a handsome World Health Organization doctor, Mario Postiglione, paid a visit to their household in 1954. They fell in love, and her mother encouraged them to marry.

The couple did not immediately leave, however. Mr. Postiglione was soon kidnapped by Burmese student insurgents and held for 20 days; June Rose and others paid a ransom of about $60,000.

Ms. Bellamy would go on to have many adventures: traveling the world with her husband, a malaria expert; working for a time as a television host of her own lifestyle program in Manila; and marrying, briefly and famously, the Burmese dictator General Ne Win.

When she ultimately found herself in Italy, without a penny, as she once said, she converted an old warehouse in Florence into a home and a studio and started a cooking school.

Ms. Bellamy died of a heart attack there on Dec. 1, her son, Michele Postiglione Bellamy, said. She was 88. Of his mother’s long and storied history, he said, “She always took the chances that life gave her.”

Ms. Bellamy would have concurred. Interviewed for a forthcoming documentary about her, she told the filmmakers: “Very few people live in the moment. For them, time is transitory. It is transitory, but it should be lived.”

June Rose Bellamy was born on June 1, 1932, in May Myo, a British outpost and hill town near the city of Mandalay. As a princess she was also known as Yadana Nat-Mai, or the goddess of the nine jewels.

June Rose grew up speaking Burmese, English and Hindi. Her father settled down and raised orchids. When the Japanese attacked Rangoon in 1941, when June Rose was 9, the family evacuated to India and spent five years there. June Rose remembered Indira Gandhi, a future prime minister of India, watching over her as she played on a swing set.

She was sent to a convent school in Kalimpong, in the Himalayan foothills, but was distracted, her son said, and expelled after she made up an answer to a geography question. When June Rose was 17, she submitted an essay to The New York Herald Tribune’s World Youth Forum, a program designed in 1947, in the wake of World War II, to foster peace by bringing young people together. Competition winners like June Rose spent three months with a host family in New York City.

There, she learned to jitterbug.

She proved resourceful. After meeting a 20-year-old Ms. Bellamy and her parents at a party at the British Consul in May Myo, the British travel writer Norman Lewis was surprised to see her take on the role of car mechanic. As he wrote in “Golden Earth, Travels in Burma” (1952), “When the family were about to leave, in an elderly and ailing British car, June Rose showed much skill in locating a short in the wiring, and much tomboyish energy in winding the starting handle until the engine fired.”

Before meeting Mr. Postiglione, Ms. Bellamy was cast in “The Purple Plain,” a 1954 film starring Gregory Peck as a suicidal pilot in World War II Burma. She played a Burmese nurse who gave Peck’s character a reason to live. But she pulled out of the movie, her son said, because it depicted “behavior that a good Buddhist Burmese would never do, and therefore gave the wrong idea of the country.”

Ms. Bellamy later told an interviewer, “It was so Hollywood, it was ridiculous.”

She was a devout Buddhist, spending a few weeks each year at a retreat in England. She was also an omnivore, a sensualist and an omniculturalist. She studied cooking in England with Kenneth Lo, a Chinese restaurateur, but taught all kinds of cuisines at her school. Her book, “L’Anima Della Spezie” (“The Soul of Spice,” 2017), was a cultural history of spices, with recipes.

For the forthcoming documentary, Ms. Bellamy talked about her dining philosophy: “Enjoy what you are eating. Do not gallop down your food. Don’t mix everything up on your plate. Keep the conversation light. The table is not made for politics.”

She left Mr. Postiglione — they were divorced in 1963 — for a man from Sienna, Italy (“a great love,” her son said), and when he died, she fell in love with a Florentine painter. He also later died.

In 1976, Ms. Bellamy sought to return to Burma to visit her ailing mother, and General Ne Win helped her secure a visa. Their marriage that year — a five-month collaboration, as she described it — was a friendship, not a love affair. The general, who had taken power in a bloody coup in 1962, felt that an alliance with a member of the royal family would be a good public relations move.

Ms. Bellamy agreed; she thought her presence might have a positive influence on her country.

It did not. She left the general after he threw an ashtray at her, accusing her of being a spy for the C.I.A. She later told an interviewer that her choice to marry had been “a sin of pride.”

In addition to her son, Ms. Bellamy is survived by a grandson. Another son, Maurizio Postiglione, died in a car accident in 1991.

At her death, Ms. Bellamy had completed her memoirs, at the urging of her son. It is expected to be published in June.