The actress who styled the Stones

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A grande dame of British Anita

rock, Anita Pallenberg went Pallenberg

out with Brian Jones, left him 1944-2017

for Keith Richards, and was rumoured to have had an affair with Mick Jagger. Ravishingly beautiful and – as her friend Marianne Faithfull put it – “wicked… hypnotic and unsettling”, she performed backing vocals on Sympathy for the Devil, encouraged Jagger to remix the tracks on Beggars Banquet, and inspired the visceral Gimme Shelter, written by Richards when he believed she was sleeping with Jagger on the set of the film Performance. She was often described as the Stones’ muse, but she was far more than that, said Brooke Mazurek on NPR. The “baddest of the bad girls”, Pallenberg “helped the Stones become the Stones”: she took a gang of awkward young men and “extricated their inner outlaws”.

Sophisticated and well connected, she changed the circles they moved in – Richards credited her with introducing the Stones to London’s hip demi-monde – while the impact she had on their image can be seen in the photos for successive albums, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. For 1965’s Out of Our Heads, they’re wearing jackets and jeans and roll-neck jumpers. By early 1967, and Between the Buttons, they’re “louche and dandified”: Jones and Richards actually look like Pallenberg, in fur coats and floppy hats. “I started to become a fashion icon,” Richards later noted, “for wearing my old lady’s clothes.” According to their PA, Jo Bergman, Pallenberg was effectively a member of the band. “The price she paid was to have her entire life more or less consumed by her association with the Stones.” She made more than a dozen films, but is best remembered for Performance; and refused to write a memoir because, she said, all anyone ever wanted to hear about was the Stones.

Born in occupied Rome in 1944, Pallenberg was the daughter of an Italian travel agent and a German secretary. Expelled from school aged 16, she became a model in Italy, and then in New York, where she began acting and hung out at Andy Warhol’s Factory. In 1965, she went backstage at a Stones concert. Though only 21, she was no ingénue: she was already using drugs, spoke four languages and considered the Stones to be “schoolkids”. Only Jones was, she recalled, “kind enough” to take up her offer of hashish and a sniff of amyl nitrate. “We ended up back at his hotel room and I spent all night holding him while he cried.” They began an intense affair, marked by violent rows, said The Daily Telegraph. They also took LSD together, which precipitated his decline into paranoia.

In 1967, after the infamous Mars bar drugs bust, she went out to Morocco with Jones to “chill out”. Following another of his crazed outbursts, however, Richards packed her into his Bentley, and she drove home with him. Their relationship survived the on-set rumours on Performance, and they went on to have three children; but by the time Marlon, their eldest son, was born, in 1969, she and Richards were already sliding into heroin addiction. A daughter, Dandelion, followed in 1972. Son Tara was born in 1976, but died in his cot at ten weeks. They were, she admitted, terrible parents. Dragged around the world as part of the band’s touring circus, often sleeping on chairs backstage, Marlon barely had an education: Pallenberg said he learned to count by pushing the buttons in hotel lifts. She injected herself with heroin daily while pregnant with Dandelion, who was mainly brought up by Richards’ mother. She said she felt responsible for Tara’s death – that the drugs must have had something to do with it; but after it, she and Richards became, if anything, more dependent.

The end point came in 1979, when a 17-year-old boy, Scott Cantrell, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at her house in South Salem, New York. It was Marlon, then ten, who dialled 911. She and Richards split up, and she disappeared into a haze of alcohol and drugs; addictions she only finally conquered in 1987. After that, she enrolled on a four-year fashion course at Central St Martins. Her graduating show was described as a “triumph of style over substance abuse”. But she hated the fashion world – “too nasty, too rip-off, too hard” – and moved on to other things. Latterly, she was more interested in tending to her allotment.